Pages

Saturday 20 March 2021

Incompetent and unaware of it - the manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect

As a strategic business unit, we ended up in a major audit due to a student complaint. The student complained about the quality of learning materials he had to endure and he was absolutely right - yet our idiots couldn’t see it.


The Dunning–Kruger effect is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. Instructional design is a university degree, tertiary education facilities such as universities require all courses to be designed by instructional designers but colleges are not that professional.

What happened was a staff member acting in a position that was not awarded through a competitive merit selection process had highly modified the learning materials that I had originally created. This was the basis of the student complaint and they just couldn’t see how this affected his learning.

This action negated the instructional design principles I had embedded into the learning program. The poorly formatted materials were grossly insufficient in terms of quality, structure and validity. These people have no idea what they are doing and it shows.

So not only are these self-absorbed people incapable of producing an original thought, they are more than willing to lay claim to other people's work. But of course, they have absolutely no idea about instructional design so they make a total hash of it. Why a management allows this to occur is based solely on their own biases.

This is a stunning example of the Dunning Krueger effect in action, an incompetent management is willing to put student learning at risk by engaging in cronyism. Placing incompetent people in important positions where they have no clue what they are doing is destructive to not only the moral of competent people, it damages everybody.

We are seeing a pretty stunning example of the downsides of groupthink, only people who agree are promoted. This yes man syndrome rewards the incompetent but when that have negative effects on student outcomes and learning then they should be called out.

No comments:

Post a Comment