Designing for Modern Learning: Beyond ADDIE and SAM

by Lisa Owens, Crystal Kadakia

Learning is no longer an activity or luxury that only occurs at specific stages in your life or career. With the digital revolution, learning has become immediate, real-time, and relevant whether you’re young, old, in the workforce, in school, or at home. As a learning and development professional, you’ve likely confronted the digital learning revolution armed with instructional design models from the pre-digital world. But today’s digital universe has a new model to address its wealth of new technologies and a new philosophy of learning experience learning cluster design.

Designing for Modern Beyond ADDIE and SAM offers you and your learners a new way to learn. It describes the fundamental shift that has occurred in the nature of L&D’s role as a result of the digital revolution and introduces a new five-step the Owens-Kadakia Learning Cluster Design Model (OK-LCD Model), a new five-step model for training design that meets the needs of modern learning. The model’s five steps or actions are an easy-to-follow mnemonic,

Change on-the-job behavior

Learn learner-to-learner differences

Upgrade existing assets

Surround learning with meaningful assets

Track transformation of Everyone’s Results.

In each chapter, the authors share stories of business leaders, L&D professionals, and learners who have successfully adopted the OK-LCD Model, detailing how they altered organizational mindsets to meet the needs of modern learners and their organizations. Included are how-to features, tools, tips, and real-life “in practice” sections.

This is an exciting time to be in L&D. It’s time to join the revolution.

Genres: Nonfiction

255 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 30, 2020

Reviews

[David Doty · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is one of many I've read over the past year in an attempt to deeply learn the strategies, technologies, and science behind effective learning & development for adult learners in the corporate setting. This is definitely the most well written, and practical, book on the subject I've read so far.

Highlighting the importance of learning & development initiatives that are closely tied to job behaviors and business metrics, the authors explain their Owend-Kadakia Learning Cluster Design model throughout the book, with individual chapters dedicated to each component of the model, from Change on-the-job behavior, to Learn learner-to-learner differences, to Upgrade existing assets, to Surround Learners with meaningful learning assets, to Track transofrmation of everyone's results.

The authors weave numerous hypothetical examples and real-life corporate stories into the narrative, which makes the material both accessible and relevant.

The authors also have developed a web site, LearningClusterDesign.com, for those who want to dive deeper into their guidance and tools.

I highly recommend this to anyone who is designing, delivering, and trying to measure the effectiveness of corporate training and professional development initiatives.

[Mali149 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been on the hunt for books that dive into modern models for today's workplace, and this one stood out than the rest. The depth of thought behind it is profound, especially with how it zeroes in on real business goals. For someone in L&D like me, it's like finding a roadmap that shows how L&D fits into today's fast-paced organizations. The book is super readable, straightforward, and it's given me some solid ideas for designing up-to-date training programs. Highly recommended!

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was very rich, actionable book putting forth a design process I find more robust than the traditional ADDIE or more recent SAM models (while retaining elements of both). Whether you are new to the industry or a veteran, I highly recommend this one.