week 6

the concept of instructional analysis is a relatively new one, i feel. with the advent of the internet and increased focus on multimedia and other forms of electronic learning technology, organisations are forced to adopt a more "hands on" approach to learning and development, instead of leaning towards bureaucratic and hierarchical methods of information dissemination popularised in the past. today's organisations and multi national corporations are becoming more flexible and opening up horizontal in their day to day interactions.

needs assessment, whereby managers evaluate the effectiveness of their learning and organisational tools, are seeking the feedback of employees, stakeholders and shareholders before making any major implementations to the organisational structure. this is indeed a welcome break from traditional methods of strategy development in the past where focus their ideas towards the higher ups for approval.

however, all these represent idealistic outcomes of needs assessment. in reality, few companies take the time and effort to develop viable and feasible implementations during the stage of front end analysis. fearing competition and backlash from other companies, many organisations invest much time and money on advertising, packaging and "state of the art" technology (or so they would like to believe) without properly assessing the actual needs of the company. the result is a substantial loss in revenue and diminished confidence in developing a learning tool, which could very well revolutionise the industry given proper planning, in the future.

needs assessment can be conduct via 3 main ways:

problem based assessments which start of with problem recognition. this leads to the development of a correlation between the problem and learner's knowledge which would lead to the development of a suitable solution.

innovation based models look at the degree to which an innovation is able to facilitate learning, and the need to alter the technology should optimal learning objectives fail to be reached. it also emphasis external conditions such as learning environments and curriculum type as well as other factors relating to society at large, which may impede the learning process.

discrepancy based models are perhaps the most complex of the 3, with needs assessment accomplished through a five step process of 1) a description of the learning goals in an organisational system 2) the evaluation of current goals 3) identify the gaps between desired and ideal outcomes 4) establish priorities for action and 5) determine the instructional needs.