Start With An E-Learning Needs Analysis By Asking These Four Questions
“We need an online course on X topic.”
If you work in instructional design, health education, training, or technical assistance, this has happened to you. Your client, your boss, your funder approaches you to request a new training, and the solution is already decided. It should definitely be an online course. You just need to fill in the content, right?
Wrong.
You need to make sure that a proper needs analysis is conducted so that you create the right solution for the problem.
I love Tim Slade’s quote about this:
“If you don’t know why a performance issue exists, you run the risk of creating a training solution for a non-training problem.”
E-learning and training cannot single handedly overcome challenges like under resourced projects, toxic work environments, poor leadership, and low morale.
Your needs analysis will help you figure out if a performance issue exists and why it exists.
Here are some key questions to ask:
(Note: “People” are your expected audience for training- employees in a particular department, public health students, project partners, managers, etc.]
(1) What are people doing right now?
You need to determine current levels of proficiency and performance. You need to understand what is motivating their current behaviors.
(2) What do you want people to be doing?
You need to outline the desired performance and behaviors.
*Make sure the desired behavior is possible and reasonable!
(3) What is the discrepancy between what you want people to do and what they’re actually doing?
You need to understand the difference between ideal and actual performance.
(4) WHY does the discrepancy exist?
This question is incredibly important because it determines the cause of the performance issue. The cause of the issue will determine the right solution.
For example, if you supervise the University Health Promotion department and observe that month after month your team of health educators fails to meet the monthly workshop goal, it’s easy to assume that it’s a training problem.
“Oh, we just need to re-train them on the goals in the strategic plan.”
“We should just train them on how to develop workshops more quickly.”
However, if the answer to question #4 is that your campus has a deep distrust/disinterest in collaborating with the Health Promotion department, your solution will look very different!
So always start with the needs analysis. I’ll be following up with another post that outlines data collection ideas for conducting a needs analysis.
I’d love to hear from you!
Have you ever been asked to develop a training without an analysis first? What challenges came up?
Have you ever had a really surprising answer to the root cause of a performance issue? How did it change your solution?