mooted to facilitate professional reflection and development. This intent remains valid, with many participants supporting its use as a tool for professional growth. What was also interesting for the research team were the other recommendations and inclinations that participants seemed to also have on how the IDeA Model and heuristic could be applied. In the next section, we will discuss the range of suggestions made by the participants in this study.
3.4 Applications of the IDeA Model There were a number of suggestions on what the IDeA Model could be used for. Some were very ambitious, pushing for national impact, while other suggestions were more muted, relating to individual or team use. Notably, for the individual curriculum designer, facilitating professional reflection is a concrete example of how the IDeA Model can be used. At the team and organisational levels, the IDeA Model was perceived to be a possible tool for facilitating communication and alignment among stakeholders, deepening development of curriculum designers and driving research on design of curricula. Furthermore, some participants cited the IDeA Model and heuristic as a tool to develop a shared understanding among the various stakeholders in the industry, with the potential to streamline and align terminology and deliverables among internal stakeholders such as business development staff, trainers and designers, as well as external stakeholders such as WDA, industry associations and adjunct trainers. An additional interesting observation was participants’ comparison of the IDeA Model with the ADDIE Model (this model has five phases: analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation), which many curriculum developers seem to be familiar with. Josiah, currently in a senior management position in a training organisation in the construction industry, compared the IDeA Model with the ADDIE Model: … probably IDeA will provide more in-depth [perspectives] into certain attributes in course development which ADDIE itself has not been suggesting it. Such comparisons indicate a need to clearly identify the purpose of the IDeA Model not as a tool that sets out a step-by-step approach to curriculum design, as in the ADDIE Model, but as a tool to uncover assumptions being made as designers and developers move iteratively between the different components of curriculum and thus as a tool for dialogue between team members and other stakeholders. The numerous suggestions are clustered into the eight areas listed below: 1. professional reflection; 2. professional development; 3. curriculum design; 4. curriculum alignment; 5. curriculum profiling and analysis; 6. quality measurement and review; 7. communication between stakeholders; 8. research on curricula.
These suggestions from participants for different uses of the IDeA Model ought to be considered carefully, as the suggestions represent current ground sentiments from new and experienced practitioners in the field, many of whom wield tremendous power and autonomy to drive changes and transformations within their own organisations and industries.
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