Terminology Tuesday: Analysis Part 1

I’ve talked a bit about analysis before, but it recently dawned on me that there are a lot of components that fall under the umbrella of analysis, so I figured I’d channel my inner analyst and take a few weeks to delve a bit deeper into the topic of analysis.

Let’s Go! Analysis in Learning Development – A Refresher

Analysis is the highest level of course development. In it’s recommended format, this phase seeks to compile all information relevant to the project and 1) determine which delivery method will best display the content in a meaningful manner, 2) whether more information is required and from whom, and 3) high-level project goals.

Elements

Within this phase you may stumble upon several elements familiar to analysis (e.g. Needs Assessment, Instructional Analysis, Task Analysis, Environmental Analysis).

You can read about Needs Assessments here, and Task Analysis here.

The basic jest is that you want to collect all of the information you possibly can in order to ensure the training you’re planning to develop is 1) necessary, 2) relevant, and 3) informed. You want to thoroughly understand the performance requirements, who your audience will be, what they need to learn, and how that information will be relevant to their performance.

Strategies

There are many strategies for conducting analysis. For example, you might want to start at the end goal of the training and work backwards. This approach will allow you to identify the goal and then the steps or prerequisites required to get to achieve the goal. Another example might be to begin with a list of questions (e.g. who is the target audience? what is their prior learning? why is the training necessary?, etc.) and discover the answers to those questions in order to conduct a thorough analysis of the situation. You might wish to examine what the organization is currently doing and why it’s not working to determine a different way ahead that will work.

However you choose to analyze, just know that you’re doing very important legwork that may save you time once you get to the design and development, and certainly the evaluation phase of your course development.

Stay tuned for more on analysis next week!