Needs Assessment and Post-it Notes
My father is a well-known speech pathologist. On the first day of teaching his “intro” classes he always ends by saying “All you have to do is speak louder and slower. Congratulations, you are all now speech pathologists.”
Of course that isn’t really all there is to being a Speech Pathologist. From that point on, the students begin years of learning about the intricacies and details of the field. But his point is that, even with all of the additional information they are going to learn, it all comes back to some simple principles. Applying my dad’s wisdom to instructional design, there are all kinds of models and ideas, but when it’s all said and done, Instructional Design is really just a bunch of common sense. In this way, we’ve all been Instructional Designers to some extent for a long time (as Geoff Wright puts it in his blog). However, even in Instructional Design we can get so caught up in the models that we loose trace of the purpose of this whole thing in the first place.
I was working as an Instructional Designer on a project several years ago where someone suggested bringing in an expert on needs assessment. We began by thinking of all of the different aspects of the project (learners, outcomes, problems, assessment, etc.). We wrote all of our ideas down on Post-it notes and the stuck them all over the walls of the conference room. Then we worked on categorizing them and creating ownership of certain areas. After that we did an assessment of the assessment to make sure we were using the best process and not leaving anyone out. To make a long process short, many hours and 7,532 Post-it notes later we were finished with the needs assessment. We had squabbled every little detail that related to the project. We were provided with reports and priority ranking sheets. When it was all said and done, if we’d spent half the time working on the project that we did on the needs assessment, we would have been done sooner and had a better product.
So what’s my point? When it comes to needs assessment and learning about our stakeholders, we need to understand the models and processes that are in place to help us be more effective. However, let’s not loose sight of the forest in spite of the trees “Figure out who your audience is and what they want. Figure out what the purpose of the project is. Test the materials a lot on a bunch of different people. Congratulations, you are all now Instructional Designers.”
September 20th, 2004 at 9:29 am
Your experience with the needs assessment isn’t so uncommon. The alternate view of not doing any kind of assessment is probably equally if not more devastating.
I was interested in having you elaborate on your comment that instructional design is just all common sense. There are many people that say that about teaching too . . . that good teaching is just common sense . . . no training needed, no skills that really need to be acquired - focus on the content.
If instructional design is just common sense - maybe the best approach would be to not have instructional designers but to have subject matter experts do the design themselves. Are there problems with this approach too? What is it that instructional designers have to offer??