The Understanding by Design (UbD) Model was developed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in 1998. UbD is also referred to as backward design because it encourages instructional designers to first identify desired results, develop assessments as evidence of understanding, and lastly create learning experiences aligned to desired outcomes and assessments. Feedback and performance are regularly reviewed to inform curriculum adjustments. UbD also emphasizes learner transfer to real-world application as strongest evidence of understanding.
The UbD Framework requires instructional designers to focus on the learning outcomes. This is departure from ADDIE and Dick and Carey Models that place stronger emphasis on analyzing learners. By focusing on learning outcomes, instructional designers establish what learners should understand and be able to do with this understanding. These are prompted by essential questions and evidenced as enduring understanding (Poston, 2016). The focus also aligns learning objectives, assessment, and learning activities to content area standards. Within the framework, the teacher is a knowledge and understanding coach, not just delivering content or assigning tasks, but facilitating the learner’s journey across Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development to ensure the learner uses this understanding to increase their capacity to perform the task independently and apply it in real-world contexts.
My minicourse is categorized as corporate training because it intends to close skills gaps for solopreneurs who want to leverage social media marketing to meet their business goals. The UbD framework’s emphasis on enduring understanding and skills transfer to real-world application is a strength for this minicourse. For as long as a solopreneur operates their business, the success of their social media strategies will require enduring understanding and skill transfer to replicate. The course will provide a roadmap to learners that mirrors the UbD framework’s backwards design, in which they will be tasked to develop engagement outcomes before developing content as part of their social media strategy. Engagement outcomes will vary based on the learner’s product/service/consumer, and enduring understanding will continue to inform their strategy, regardless of the social media platform they choose to market their offerings. A solopreneur who documents their process with the help of this minicourse increases the likelihood of marketing continuity so that the brand is minimally subject to creative design misinterpretation. This would reflect the most authentic assessment.
Another strength of UbD is the role of the instructor as a coach. As with many other instructional models, the feedback loop is crucial for increasing curriculum efficacy and ongoing revisions. The coaching role goes deeper than assigning reading and performance tasks, to an invested interest in learners’ development, understanding, preparation, and progression. Establishing clear learning outcomes helps me develop a training regimen (authentic assessments and learning activities) for each learner’s unique progression.
I have prior experience as a secondary classroom teacher. In terms of complexity, between ADDIE, Dick and Carey, and UbD, I believe UbD would be easiest to implement in the classroom because of its focus on standards and objective alignment which seems to supercede knowing and analyzing learners in 9–12 classrooms. I agree that limited guidance on specific instructional strategies could be a limitation because successful implementation is measured by learner performance during learning experiences. If an educator, especially a new educator unaware of different instructional strategies, chooses learning activities that don’t produce enduring understanding, the instruction is considered ineffective.
For this course, I plan to invest the most time designing learning activities, ensuring those activities produce the knowledge necessary to pass assessments, achieve objectives, and meet the standard. For my learners to acquire enduring understanding, they need learning experiences in real time in real-world contexts because they expect to see results quickly in a fast-paced social media environment. My learners don’t intend to wait until the course is finished to test their knowledge. I expect them to learn independently through exploration, trial, and error.