At my job with Computing for Arts & Sciences, I was very recently tasked with coordinating cross-training for my team, the Infrastructure Team. There are four of us on the team, and I wish that meant that we were all working on the same task and objectives. While we do have similar goals in mind, our roles and responsibilities are very different. We basically have four areas of expertise with little crossover. In alphabetical order, they are:

Apple Workstations
Linux Servers and Workstations
Windows Workstations
Windows Servers

I handle everything for Windows Workstations and like to think that I’m quite good at what I do. However, my colleagues don’t fully grasp everything I do, and it can be difficult to go on vacation knowing that you’re going to have a large workload when you get back. The same goes for the rest of the positions. As such, we started a cross-training program about a year ago. I’ve done well incorporating daily training into my workflow, but the others have not. As such, I’ve been asked to coordinate the cross-training needs of the rest of the team. It was perfect timing, as I started this coursework about two weeks later. I’ll be building the cross-training needs of the Windows Server manager; we’ll call him Chris.

What I Learned From Analysis

When you’re putting together training, adequate time needs to be devoted to an in-depth analysis of the needs and expectations of the learner. If this thorough analysis isn’t done, you are doomed to repeat yourself. This may seem a bit cliche, but it has been discussed time and time again.

Although I’ve always known what Chris does, it’s been enlightening to learn into some details of his daily workload. When tying that into a design document, I noticed how tedious it can be to outline the details of the needs. I’ve also realized how complex the whole educational design process truly is.

When planning the objectives for the learning I quickly realized that we needed a properly configured learning environment. Otherwise, the learners would be learning in a production system. This is never a good idea. Especially, if you like your computer to stay working smoothly.

The Relation of Analysis and Design

Analysis and design should not be seen as a separate. While analysis provides the structural materials that are needed, the design acts as the blueprint to describe how it is all put together. You won’t end up with a sturdy structure without both. This is described as a great length by Rominowski (1981) as he details the importance of thorough analysis when developing quality design systems.

The systemic design that was used remind me a lot of the process flows, that we use in I.T. to describe infrastructure and decision trees. We often have to write technical documentation for our customers, so they know how to do something. When writing those, I use direct action verbs in my step-by-step instructions; however, the use of Bloom’s Taxonomy verbs was very new to me. When reading Rapid Instructional Design (Piskurich, 2015), I was a bit overwhelmed by all of the kinds of analysis to consider; I pushed on though.

One might think that all sources on this topic would be identical, but that’s not the case. This a very qualitative approach to getting quantitative results. As such, the path defined may be straight and narrow, but the path traversed veers widely. I thought maybe the Information R/Evolution video, would tie things together a bit, but it really just discussed how we have so much information at our fingertips, that we must all work together to organize it, so we can harness it. Although I agree with him, I don’t foresee myself joining a crusade to start tagging blog articles.

References

Romiszowski, A. (1981). Designing Instructional Systems. New York: Nichols. Retrieved from http://courseweb.unt.edu/AOP_collaborative/readings/5210/Week2/romiszowski_a_1981.pdf
Piskurich, G. (2015). Rapid instructional design (3rd ed., pp. 15-104). Hoboken: John Wiley
Wesch, M. (2007, October 12). Retrieved June 16, 2018, from https://youtu.be/-4CV05HyAbMf
(2014, July 30). Process Flow - LWE [Digital image]. Retrieved June 17, 2018, from http://ceoskillfoundations.com/media/Process_Flow_-_LWE.jpg