Although the object of management has shifted over the years, management has been a critical function in educational technology since the field began in the 1920s. In the first formal definition statement, management was seen as necessary to controlling the products and the processes that were used in the field (Ely, 1963). By the time of the publication of the 1972 definition, the idea of management included the supervision of personnel and the operation of organizations (Ely, 1972). As systems thinking became more pervasive, the systems approach became the dominant paradigm for thinking about management processes in instructional development and technology-based learning systems (Association for Educational

Communications and Technology, 1977) following the theory proposed by Heinich (1970). By the time the 1994 definition was published, management meant planning, coordinating, organizing, and supervising resources, information, and delivery systems in the context of managing instructional design (ID) projects (Seels & Richey, 1994).