Need Assessment: The Brain's Destressor

Written on 11:59 PM by Christian Olson

Currently I'm studying articles about the best practices for distance education. The article du jour comes from a great Utah State ITLS professor named Nick Eastmond. He is assisting me with my internship and I thought that I should read an article containing his thoughts on distance education.

He believes strongly in Needs Assessment and Evaluation. I've taken numerous classes on evaluation and I'm a strong believer in its effectiveness, but I've never taken the time to really think about Needs Assessment. I'm finally doing it and it is fascinating to me.

As I go throughout life I encounter many problems, as do most I'm sure. These problems nag at me and cause me stress and grief until I finally solve or remove them. However, I never rid myself of these problems until I define for myself what the need is.

For example, I bought a junker car that needs to last me six months (keep your fingers crossed). However, I got an initial inspection and they told me that I had a torn (insert technical car part name here) and a possible crack (insert other random car part that I currently can't remember) that was causing a leak. I asked them how much it would be and they responded $900. I started panicking, then anger set in, and so on until I completed all the steps of acceptance. I spent most of the day stressing about this and telling myself a lot of awful possible outcomes.

That's when it occurred to me: I need to define the problem (or "need", if you will) and then I can find a solution. The problem was that there were to parts of my car that needed repair. Well, as I thought about possible solutions, I remembered that the guy who sold it to me had fixed something and got grease everywhere. I wiped off all the grease and all-of-a-sudden my "cracked" part stopped leaking. Now I just need to fix the torn other thing which is a $7 repair. Crisis averted.

Anyway, my point is that I couldn't find the solution until I discovered the need. This seems to be the case with any instruction you design. Until you define your needs and constraints, everyone is spinning their wheels and stressing out. Needs Assessment is crucial!