Andrew S. Gibbons is an American practitioner and theorist in the field of instructional design and technology. He has proposed an architectural theory of instructional designGibbons, A. S. & Rogers, P. C. (2009). "The architecture of instructional theory" in C. M. Reigeluth & A. Carr-Chellman (eds.), "Instructional-design theories and models", volume III. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.- Gibbons, A. S. (2014). An architectural approach to instructional design. New York: Routledge. influenced by the structural principles of artifact modularization drawn from a number of design disciplines, as exemplified by the work of Carliss Baldwin and Kim B. Clark.Baldwin and Clark (2000), Design Rules: The Power of Modularity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Gross, M., Ervin, M. Anderson, J., and Fleisher, A. (1987). "Designing with constraints" in Y. E. Kalay (ed.), Computability of design. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Brand, S. (1994). How buildings learn: What happens after they're built. New York: Viking Press.
Education In 1969, Gibbons earned a B.A. in English with a chemistry minor from Brigham Young University. In 1974, he completed a doctorate in instructional psychology at Brigham Young University. During that time, he worked on the research team of M. David Merrill, assisting in the conception of component display theory.Merrill, M. D. (1983). "Component Display Theory" in C. M. Reigeluth (ed). Instructional-design theories and models: An overview of their current status, pp.279-333. Hillsdael, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Component display theory provided the basis later for Merrill's instructional transaction theory.Merrill, M. D. (1996). "nstructional Transactional Theory: An Instructional Design Model based on Knowledge Objects". Educational Technology. 36(3): 30–37.
Academic career Gibbons accumulated eighteen years of practical design experience as a project director and consultant for two start-up instructional design consultancies: Courseware Incorporated and Wicat Systems (World Institute for Computer-Aided Instruction). The idea of computer-based instruction did not exist in the thinking of the business and educational leaders in 1974, though research was conducted in high-tech laboratories as early as the 1950s,Atkinson, R. & Wilson, H. (1969). Computer-Assisted Instruction: A Book of Readings. New York: Academic Press. but cost and technology factors prohibited widespread dissemination. The opportunity to create large-scale new technologybased designs for a variety of training clients provided Gibbons with many insights into the issues of creating instructional experiences efficiently that were also effective.
In 1993, Gibbons moved to a teaching and research position at the Department of Instructional Technology of Utah State University, associating himself once more with M. David Merrill's ID2 research team. From 1993 to 2003, the conceptual basis for an architecture-oriented design theory grew, resulting in the publication of a book that began to show architectural themes that would evolve into the architectural design theory.Gibbons, A. S. & Fairweather, P. G. (1998). Computer-based instruction: Design and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
In 2003, Gibbons became the department chair at Brigham Young University for the Department of Instructional Psychology and Technology in the David O. McKay School of Education.Biographical page for Professor Andrew S. Gibbons, Brigham Young University During this time, the architectural design theory took its published form in a series of articles and a book.Gibbons, A. S. & Rogers, P. C. (2009). "The Architecture of Instructional Theory" in C. M. Reigeluth & A. Carr-Chellman (eds.), Instructional-design theories and models, volume III. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.- Gibbons, A. S., McConkie, M., Seo, K. K., & Wiley, D. (2009). "Theory for the design of instructional simulations and microworlds" in C. M. Reigeluth and A. Carr-Chellman (eds.), Instructional-design theories and models, volume III. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.- Gibbons, A. S. (2014). An Architectural Approach to Instructional Design. New York: Routledge. Professor emeritus status was awarded in 2016. Gibbons continues to remain active in researching and writing on architectural design theory.
Research and books Gibbons' architectural design theory unifies what otherwise would appear to be separate threads of his work on design theory. The question had to be addressed early whether "theory" was an appropriate term to use referring to a system of design thinking. Gibbons supported his position that it was, citing the description of a uniquely design-related type of theory by Herbert Simon in Sciences of the Artificial.Simon, H. A. (199). Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gibbons addressed the issue in a paper titled "Explore, explain, design"Gibbons, A. S. & Bunderson, C. V. (2005). "Explore, explain, design" in K. Kempf-Leonard (ed.), Encyclopedia of social measurement. New York: Elsevier. with co-author C. Victor Bunderson. In this view, explanation, which is the goal of science, is carried out in search of theories about "how things work", leading ideally toward a hypothesized, unifying theory of everything; in contrast, research on design processes and principles is carried out in search of theories of "how things can be made to work". Vincenti,Vincenti, W. G. (1990). What Engineers Know and How They Know It. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Klir,Klir, G. (1969). An Approach to General Systems Theory. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. EdelsonEdelson, D. (2002). "Design research: What we learn when we engage in design" Journal of the learning sciences, 11(1), 105-121. and others describe research in engineering (design) that can lead to design theory that is distinct from scientific theory in several ways.
Overall, Gibbons' published work represents the gradual emergence of the architectural theory and then multiple attempts to demonstrate the viability of the theory by fleshing out details. His theory of model-centered instruction,Gibbons, A. S., "Model-Centered Instruction" Journal of Structural Learning and Intelligent Systems. 14: 511-540, 2001. for example, separates two major concerns of instructional designers: content and strategy. The term "content" in this context refers to abstracted subject-matter and not media resources. Model-centered instruction proposes that the most appropriate form of content is a dynamic interactive model and that experiencing and exploring the model should be augmented by support of different types. This counters the common intuition that verbal and visual expressions of content are sufficient. Model-centering forces the designer to separate decisions about subject-matter from decisions about its expression (messaging and representation) and from the means of leading learners into interactions with it ("strategic" interaction). It leaves open the question of the means (expression controls) by which the learner might carry out the interactions.
Gibbons and his colleagues explored design considerations for simulations in the light of model-centering.Gibbons, A. S., Fairweather, P. G., Anderson, T. A., & Merrill, M. D. (1997). "Simulation and computer-based instruction: A future view" in C. R. Dills and A. J. Romiszowski (eds.) Instructional development paradigms. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Instructional Technology Publications. As the architectural theory emerged, this led to a description of how designers might use it as a tool to guide the production of simulation designs without relying on a process design model.Gibbons, A. S., McConkie, M., Seo, K. K., & Wiley, D. (2009), "Theory for the design of instructional simulations and microworlds" in C. M. Reigeluth and A. Carr-Chellman (eds.), Instructional-design theories and models, volume III. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
In the early 1990s, the interests of large-scale training distributors turned toward standard approaches for producing and distributing technology-involved instruction on a massive scale. A standard plan for product modularization was considered by them to be a solution. The question was, which dimensions to standardize. The U.S. Department of Defense funded the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative and a large number of commercial interests subscribed to the IMS Global Learning Consortium. Each major project created a unique product packaging standard, with its own centralized data collection and learner management functions. Both standards are widely used.Gibbons, A. S. (2000). "The nature and origin of instructional objects" in D. Wiley (ed.), The instructional use of learning objects. Bloomington, IN: Association for Educational Communications and Technology.Gibbons, A. S. (2006). "The interplay of learning objects and design architectures" Educational Technology. 46(1), 18-21.
In a different line of work, Gibbons and Langton conducted a two-year project to validate one of the claims of the architectural theory: the claim that for every functional design layer there are numerous theories from the literature of related design fields capable of informing design within that layer specifically. The control layer was selected for study, the layer within which the designer determines the kinds of expressive controls the learner will be given. An extensive literature review revealed a number of such theories that could improve the design of an interactive instructional control system.Gibbons, A. S. & Langton, M. B. (2016). "The application of layer theory to design: The control layer" Journal of computing in higher education, 28(2), 97-135. This has encouraged further studies of additional layers.