Thoughts About Then and Now in Instructional Systems at Florida State Robert K. Branson Then and now is a long time apart! When Bob Morgan called me in California in 1969 to say that he had successfully recruited Bob Gagne to join FSU, he then said that if I planned to come, I had to decide shortly. I knew that Briggs was already here along with some other top CAI folks like Duncan Hansen and Walt Dick. It was quite an emotional struggle to move from the San Francisco Bay Area backwards in time to Tallahassee. The other side of the struggle was the recognition that the balance of power in ISD had suddenly shifted to the Southeast. The prevailing attitude among the faculty optimistically embraced the better mousetrap theory. If we made better CAI lessons, if we made better instructional materials, if we structured the learning environment empirically, then we could improve educational practices. Although this optimism was not borne out in Florida, it was certainly confirmed in Korea. During our initial work with the Army and subsequently with the Navy, we saw genuine enthusiasm for systems methodologies influence decisions on the purposes and processes of training. As instructional systems models were mandated within the services, we saw a widespread adoption of training programs to prepare staff to perform ISD. We did not then anticipate that the capabilities of the services to use the new tools were lagging the demand for productivity. We became much more appreciative of the high level of professional work required to produce really effective instruction that would improve performance and reduce the time to criterion. In the early 1980s, the new focus on job performance was gradually permeating the field and a wider range of alternative solutions became more attainable. In my view, when the vast information storage capability of the videodisc could be combined with the random access control capabilities of the computer, we then had the choice to bypass many time consuming components of training and go directly to job performance. Additionally, as capabilities increased and prices fell, computer controlled high-density storage media could also be sensibly used for education and training. They could have been sensibly used, but most often they were simply added to the mix and often isolated in separated and dedicated rooms. Once again, we became much more vividly aware of the high level of professional work required to produce really effective instruction and the difficulties encountered in trying to displace obsolete practices. On the software side of the decade, one of the important developments was the increasingly widespread adoption of the concepts in concurrent design and engineering. By studying the Japanese approach to product design and development, we became more intensely aware of the power of stakeholder involvement. The message was clear: Ignore key stakeholders at the outset and reap failure during implementation. So, importing these ideas into the ISD provided another powerful tool in system development. Armed with our new tools, in the late 1980s we once again succumbed to the belief that we really had an important contribution to make in public education. We believed that we could shift the paradigm from a teaching-centered model to a learning-centered model. That's one of the striking faults of the supply-side mentality. The fact that important improvements can be made does not in any way mean that they will. To make major changes to increase the performance and productivity of public education requires both a consensus of key stakeholders and a supporting infrastructure, neither of which obtains at this time. This same knowledge and commitment deficit was overcome very successfully in agriculture many years ago and I wish we could learn from them. Once again, major changes in technology provide opportunities to make changes and improvements in knowledge generation and delivery. I believe that faculty members should properly be involved in defining precisely the data they should collect, the conversion of this data into information, the conversion of that information into knowledge, and the dissemination of that knowledge in efficient and appropriate formats. I don't think we can continue to afford to devote full-time faculty positions to repetitive delivery of information. It is my current hope that the immense capabilities of the Internet and other advancing technologies not only can enable a transformation in knowledge acquisition, but that through clever guidance and effective management, they will succeed this time.