Connect e-Learning to Business Objectives

Find the most valued outcomes

This is the needs assessment stage, sometimes unfortunately referred to as “training needs analysis.” It’s unfortunate because calling it “training needs analysis” implies skipping ahead to decide on a solution (training, e-Learning, blending) before the problem is identified. Thinking of this step as problem identification, or as the first part of what I’ve been referring to as “up-front analysis” may help. After this step, you should know the difference in human performance between what people are doing and what they would be doing in a perfect world.

Admittedly, this sounds a bit esoteric — it’s a problem shared by most descriptions of needs assessment. It may help to remember that needs assessment was at one time a somewhat political process, used to decide what should be included in the curriculum of the public schools in the United States . You can find a description of this in Roger Kaufman’s Educational System Planning, together with a concise discussion of the ISD process (see the sidebar). If you are not familiar with the formal ISD process, I recommend this book as a useful overview, even if you work in an industry that would never tolerate the level of detail Kaufman describes.

How do you perform a needs assessment?

Needs assessment is still a slightly messy and inexact process. However, William Rothwell provides an extensive description of various options for collecting needs assessment data, under an overall needs assessment plan. His approach is certainly thorough, and resembles (as he says) a research plan. Under some circumstances this would be appropriate, but many times the team (or the individual) doing the assessment does not have the luxury of the time or the resources required for a formal needs assessment. In these cases, the needs assessment normally proceeds by using one (or more) of several approaches:

• Interviews with performers, centered around concerns expressed by managers or decision-makers;
• Direct observation of performers on the job;
• Review of production or administrative records;
• Questionnaires completed by performers; and
• Various forms of brainstorming or focus groups

Each of these has its particular advantages and drawbacks, mainly having to do with cost and time, but most can be reliable ways to identify discrepancies in concrete, measurable terms.

In the needs assessment, then, you are first going to be identifying discrepancies in concrete and measurable terms and then deciding whether these discrepancies are important. For the second part, it may be enough to ask, “What would happen if you left it alone?” If a discrepancy is not important, you can move on to the next one. Eventually you are going to have a list of the important discrepancies and you can identify the priority items.

What’s stopping you?

This is where you figure out what’s keeping you from obtaining the valued outcome. This will usually be some combination of skill or knowledge deficiency, poor motivation or inappropriate consequences, obstacles to performance, ineffective processes for selecting employees, or bad design of jobs, processes, or organizations. e-Learning can only deal with skill or knowledge deficiencies, but it’s important to be sure you aren’t, for example, trying to use training to fix a job design problem.

As Ron Zemke says in Figuring Things Out, it’s a fundamental mistake to directly challenge the idea of a decision-maker that “we need some e-Learning.” But remember that at this point, we still aren’t designing training. We are analyzing the priority needs to see which ones have skill or knowledge deficiencies as their causes.

Fortunately, Peter Pipe and Robert Mager provide an excellent blueprint for the process in Analyzing Performance Problems. The systematic approach they describe actually parallels the classic ISD model, and many practitioners over the years have found Pipe and Mager’s description more suited to their situation. It is also somewhat easier to explain performance analysis to decision-makers by using Pipe and Mager’s book. Allison Rossett’s book First Things Fast provides more information on performance analysis.

There are several other procedures that, like performance analysis, can help you decide whether the discrepancies are going to be ones that you can address with instruction or whether another approach would be a better answer. These are described in detail in Mastering the Instructional Design Process and in Developing Vocational Instruction by Robert Mager and Kenneth Beach, Jr.

• Critical incident analysis describes what happens when the performance is not correct. By identifying what isn’t going right, it should be possible to identify what can be done about it.
• Task analysis is a description of what a competent performer does, made from actual observation of the performance. This directly supports development of learning objectives.
• Target population description looks at the characteristics of the learners. This is more for the purpose of adjusting learning objectives than for figuring out what the learning objectives should be.
• Goal analysis is a special case, described in Mager’s Goal Analysis. You may sometimes have an important goal like “safety awareness,” that is not a performance but an abstraction, difficult to define in terms of exactly what is wanted. Goal analysis is a way to come up with descriptions of specific outcomes that you would agree mean that the goal is also achieved.

Breaking down the objectives

This is, I hope, familiar territory. At this point you have identified priority performance needs related to important strategic organizational goals, and you have analyzed those needs to determine what you can do about them, through instruction, to correct skill and knowledge deficiencies. In other words, it is time to set some learning objectives.

Learning objectives describe the results of instruction, rather than the process of instruction. The definitive guide to writing top-level (sometimes called “terminal”) objectives is Robert Mager’s Preparing Instructional Objectives. William Rothwell’s book also contains a complete guide to writing objectives, including cross-cultural considerations.

To me, Mager’s description of an objective has always been the clearest:

An objective is an intent communicated by a statement describing a proposed change in a learner — a statement of what the learner is to be like when he has successfully completed a learning experience. It is a description of a pattern of behavior (performance) we want the learner to be able to demonstrate.

Another of Mager’s books recommended above, Goal Analysis, addresses development of learning objectives where the outcome was initially described in “fuzzy” terms (“We want learners to appreciate the importance of safety.”).

A top-level objective may require one or more supporting, or enabling, objectives. The learner may need to be able to use a micrometer before she can machine a part to within tolerances, for example. Once the top-level objectives are defined, the enabling objectives are broken out. These hierarchical sets of objectives guide the rest of the design process.

Methods and tools

For each of the learning objectives, the next step is to identify the kind of performance that is involved and the alternatives available to teach this performance. This is a topic that could (and does) occupy entire books, so I’m only going to summarize it here. This is the point at which the designer looks at the different methods and means available to support learning for each objective. It is common to hear decisions made about whether a given need is going to be addressed by e-Learning, blending, or instructor-led methods even before the learning objectives have been defined. However, these decisions are typically best made after methods and tools analysis has been completed.

Performance types

Sometimes instructional designers choose the methods with which they are most comfortable or familiar. Logically, though, it makes more sense to choose the method that is best matched to the outcome and the kind of performance required to produce it. As Mager and Beach point out, a simulator is a great way to teach someone to fly an airplane, but a bad way to teach spelling. Two different kinds of performance are involved.

There are a couple of ways to look at the question of performance types. Mager and Beach, in Developing Vocational Instruction, suggest a system of five categories:

• Discrimination: knowing when to do something, or knowing when it is done
• Problem-Solving: deciding what to do
• Recall: knowing what to do and why to do it
• Manipulation: knowing how to do it
• Speech: knowing how to say it

Ruth Clark, in Developing Technical Training, offers a content-performance matrix that has the same basis as Mager and Beach’s categories. In this matrix, the learner will be asked to either apply or remember the information to be taught. The information can be classified as facts, concepts, processes, procedures or principles.

Review each of the learning objectives to determine the performance that is required and, in the case of Clark’s matrix, the type of information being taught.

Methods and Tools Analysis

Once the designer has identified the performances required, Clark, and Mager and Beach, suggests appropriate methods for teaching it. These are mostly media-independent.

Mager and Beach provide three guides to identifying methods or techniques for teaching the performance:

1. . Choose the technique that most closely approximates the performance conditions called for by the objective.
2. Choose the technique that causes the learner to perform in a manner most closely approximating the performance called for on the job.
3. Choose the technique that will allow the learner to make the largest number of relevant responses per unit time.

Clark offers a different approach. For each of the information types (facts, concepts, processes, procedures, principles), she has a whole chapter on how to teach it. Teaching concepts, for example, involves helping the learner remember the definition and then systematically developing the learner’s ability to apply the concept by correctly identifying examples. Clark also suggests best practices for both classroom and e-Learning delivery.

Once the most relevant or appropriate methods have been identified, advantages and disadvantages are listed for each and the designer can choose the one that is most practical or affordable. It is at this point that the designer begins to make decisions about the use of e-Learning, and about sequencing the content and blending delivery methods.

Conclusion

This has been a very fast review of resources and ideas to help e-Learning managers, designers, and developers think about the critical early steps in instructional design. This part of the design process is where the link is made between e-Learning and organizational strategy, but it is the one part most often “passed over lightly.” By beginning with a strategic focus (perhaps using a balanced scorecard approach), and then systematically identifying and analyzing priority needs, followed by identification of objectives and analysis of the appropriate methods and tools, there is a far greater chance that the finished e-Learning or blended product will provide maximum value to the organization.

REFERENCE

Bloom, Michael. “Developing a Balanced Scorecard Approach to Measure the Performance of Your e-Learning Initiatives.” Presentation made April 1, 2003 to the Conference Board of Canada. Retrieved April 1, 2004 from http://www.conferenceboard.ca/education/reports/pdfs/elearning_presentation.pdf

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