Session 3

1. What is the purpose of the Analysis phase of the Instructional Design Process?

The purpose of the analysis is to give the designer what needs to be taught in the training you are planning to create. It helps answer the questions who, what, and how. This means it helps the designer find out who the product is for and what are they like, what it needs to teach, and how you know it has been successfully taught. Some of the time this step is overlooked because some designers are the SME of the project and believes they know this part of the process. This is also overlooked because of time constraints or just the reason that they want to get to the design part of the project and finish the process.

2. According to the instructor, what are the three big questions the analysis must address?

The three big questions the analysis answers is who, what, and how. The who refers to who the product is designed to teach, their characteristics and preferences. The what pertains to what your product is designed to teach, and the how is how will you know the project was successful.

3. According to the instructor what are the three main types of procedures used in the analysis? Please give an example for each category.

The three main types of procedures used in analysis are people items, mining the literature base, and document recovery. People items refer to any information that involves people such as surveys and focus groups. Mining literature base is where one looks for research and material in the field the project is designed for. Document recovery includes artifacts related to the topic of the project, such as texts and prior teaching materials.

4. What are some differences between the information the chapter presents about the analysis phase and the information provided by the instructor?

The information the instructor provided is split into three sections, people items, mining literature base, and document recovery. In this particular chapter of the book, it mainly discussed the people items of analysis more than the other two areas. It discussed in depth the different types of analysis including task analysis, observation, focus groups, and many others.

5. Case study: You are asked to develop an online training module to teach new janitorial staff how to use the floor buffing machine. Explain how you will do your analysis. Be sure to specify what type of analysis procedures you will use and why.

First thing I would do is I would request or require a manual or an SME to find out how to operate that particular machine. Depending on the amount of time and resources I have, I would use a SME, or if one was not available then a manual and access to one would have to do. Second I would interview the staff already using the machine and ask for any shortcuts or techniques they would recommend anyone new to the machine would need to know. These would be my first analysis procedure because first of all I would need to know somethings such as terminology, parts of the machine, and I would need to have a SME, or manual, in order to know how to operate the floor buffer if I were to develop an online training for this machine. The interviewing of staff already using the machine would assist in giving me insite and knowledge of what is expected for the new employees to know how to use the equipment in question.

6. Case study: You are asked to develop a video training module to orient new employees in a medium sized family restaurant. Explain how you will do your analysis. Be sure to specify what type of analysis procedures you will use and why.

First I would ask the person wanting the training module what are the tasks they are wanting new employees to learn and gather an idea of what tasks I would need to include in the training. Then I would observe the workers (preferably workers that perform the task well) doing the tasks in question, then interview the workers and ask them questions about the tasks and questions such as, what would a new employee need to know to accomplish the task? Then I would shift through all the questions and keep what might be important and throw and take out any personal opinions I got from the employees I questioned. From there, I would create a list of tasks and any knowledge needed to perform the tasks and show them to the manager or owner who wanted the training created to review the work and add anything I might have missed.

Session 2

What is Instructional Design and why do we do it? Go beyond what the book says in your answer.

Instructional design is the process to help create effective trainings in an efficient way. This process helps the designer to ask the right questions, make the right choices, and produce a useful product. This process helps the designer to discover the best way to solve the situation at hand, which is usually through different types of trainings. The some of the different types of trainings are classroom trainings, on-the-job trainings, self-instructions, and technology based trainings. The reason we use instructional design is to create the most effective and efficient training to produce the best results.

Examine any of the instructional design models we have looked at in this session (Dick and Carey, Seels and Glasgow, Rapid Prototyping etc.) and compare it to the ADDIE model. List some of the similarities and differences between your model and the ADDIE model. Explain the advantages and disadvantage of each model.

Seels and Glasgow model- This model shows that there are more than one thing happening at some point through the process of instructional design. For example, while the task and instructional analysis is being done, simultaneously the objective and tests are being developed.

ADDIE model- This stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. This is the generic model for Instructional Design. This model states that each of these item happen in this order, but the disadvantage to this model is that fact that it doesn't show integration and digression within the process. One example is if the designer went through the analysis and design of the training, but then discovered something about their audiences so they had to go back to analysis to find how best to reach their audiences.

Describe either "Performance Gap Assessment" or "Performance Opportunity Assessment". Now explain how you would use the method you have just described in a development project that you might actually undertake. Be sure to explain methods that you would use in your assessment.

Performance Gap Assessment- It is an assessment that examines how the performance should be and what it is now. This assists designers with discovering the problem and finding the best solution to solve it. The process has the following steps: identify the problem, analyze the tasks and conditions of the job, analyze the current performance levels, identify the causes of the problem, identify the desired performance outcome, identify the expectations of your training as related to the outcome.

A project I am planning to implement involves teacher training of technology available to the teachers. This means I plan to identify the technology the teachers have access to, assess their knowledge of the technology, survey the teachers feelings about technology and trainings, and create trainings to fit increase knowledge of the technology.

Explain Cost Benefit Analysis. Why is it we rarely see such analysis in education training?

Basically cost benefit analysis is a strategy to figure out the cost and benefits of designing and implementing a training. This includes costs like salary, benefits cost, lost production, program development, time, and hard costs. Also this helps to show benefits of the trainings.

The reason we rarely see such analysis in education training because basically they are worried about teaching the teachers what "they" believe they need to know, instead of researching and analyzing what the teachers actually need training on. For example, teacher trainings are usually based on how the students' scored on the standardized tests. If overall the district did not do well in math, then all teachers are required to attend math trainings. Not to mention these trainings are created fast and not geared to it's audiences. They teach math k-6 in one class, but doesn't realize teaching math in k-2 is different then teaching math in the grades of 3-6. They are more interested in quantity then quality. They want to teach more teachers at one time, then to teach to the grade level of the teachers. This is one of the many complaints I have heard from the teachers.

What is the relationship between Learning Theory and Instructional Design?

The learning theory is the way someone looks at a situation or learns and this is a part of instructional design. When designing a training one step of a good design is considering how the target group learns.