Jul 5 2021

Make LXD Authentic to What is Needed Back-on-the-Job.

Otherwise it’ll be just a wasted experience. Even if fun.

That’s Done Via Analysis

pb-ISD: Asking “What do they need to know?” … is an okay question … as long as it is preceded by “What do they need to do?”

Make your LXD – Learning Experience Designs authentic to what is needed Back-on-the-Job.

Otherwise, why bother?

I do four types of Analysis in almost all of my ISD efforts:

Target Audience
Performance (& Gaps)
Enabling Knowledge/Skills
Existing T&D Assessments

There have been a couple of efforts where my client didn’t want to consider ReUse of any Existing Content – so we skipped #4.

Start First with Performance

I establish the “chunks of Performance – which I call AoPs – Areas of Performance. The number of AoPs varies by the effort’s scope and how the Performance was chunked. ADDIE would have at least 5 AoPs.

Here is a Sales Example.

Then I would detail the Ideal Performance and the Gaps using a Performance Model format that has evolved from what I learned back in 1979 that was a derivative of a derivative of what Geary A. Rummler (RIP) used.

Here is a Sales example – modified from work I did back in 1986.

Note there was more than one PM Chart for the first AoP.

Then Second with the Enabling Knowledge & Skills

I don’t do Inventories unattached to meaningful data. I systematically derive the Enabling K/S data from the Performance Model data and link them so that all of that data can be used in my structured Design Process (at the CAD or MCD or IAD levels in my PACT Processes for pb-ISD).

I ask “what performers need to know” via a systematic review of the Performance Model data which was generated first, and then I derive the Enabling K/Ss one K/S Category at a time (for focus) and one Area of Performance (AoP) at a time – and there are potentially 17 Categories of Enabling K/Ss.

Note: all 17 K/S Categories are used in every effort. It happens. But rarely. Your thoughtful review of each Category should clue you in about that.

And I like to tease out the enabling Knowledge and/or Skills as detailed (at least by discreet names) – as they both come together in my Design Process. Additional details for both Ks & Ss are determined during Development (if they’re skill in scope).

Here is an example modified from that 1986 project. At this point the list of K/S Items has been generated systematically from a review of AoP “A” only for K/S Category 6.

The next step would be to review each of the remaining AoPs to complete this part of the Analysis for Category 6.

However, in a real effort the columns on the right of the “Link to AoPs” would not be done until all of the AoPs were reviewed and the list of K/S Items completed.

KSA?

KSAs has stood for a couple of things since 1979. It has been Knowledge-Skills-Attitudes … or … Abilities.

And note, it is sometimes presented as SKAs.

I don’t do Analysis of “Attitudes” – as the people who taught me all of this back in 1979 didn’t believe we had any business messing with people’s Attitudes – although we should constrain any inappropriate Behaviors from inappropriate Attitudes – via an engineered Balance of Consequence System – that encourages and discourages certain Behaviors.

That shaped my approach many years ago.

And Abilities is already captured in the Performance Model Chart data. Beginning with the end in mind and all.

So it really should have been (IMO): AKSs.

This Past Post addresses how I ask “what do they need to know” … 17 categories of Enabling K/Ss for systematically deriving what they need to know. https://eppic.biz/2016/08/23/ld-capturing-reading-out-instructional-analysis-data/

My 2020 Book