Bonni Stachowiak: Teaching in Higher Ed
Bonni Stachowiak is the host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, a professor of business and management at Vanguard University, and my life partner. Prior to her academic career, Bonni was a human resources consultant and executive officer for a publicly traded company. She joins me monthly to respond to listener questions.
Be sure to align with the organization's mission, vision, and goals:
- Requires that you have at least a basic understanding of strategy (long-term planning).
- There are many approaches to strategy.
- A good person to know about in the area of creating competitive advantage is Michael Porter.
Steps to needs analysis:
- Determine the problem(s) by finding a key business lever that will make a big impact on the organization if it gets fixed/improved. People pay more attention to fixing problems than they do to making improvements.
- Affirm that the problem really is the problem (work with stakeholders to see if there is consensus on the key problem(s); engage at all levels of the organization, as there can often be a disconnect between senior management and the line staff who typically engage directly with customers).
- Develop solutions – training is not always the solution, though people tend to go to it as an “easier” way of addressing deeply rooted cultural issues.
Two broad types of evaluation:
- Formative: satisfaction with the training itself. It is the most common form of evaluation conducted since it is the easiest and least expensive way to assess.
- Summative: extent to which real change has occurred. This is the least common form of evaluation conducted because it is hardest and most expensive – but most important for determining whether ROI has occurred (Jack Phillips is a good person to read on the subject of training ROI).
Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluation (Kirkpatrick is considered the “father” of training evaluation):
- Reaction: people's reaction to the training; did they like it or not?
- Learning: what knowledge was gained as a result of the training; what did people learn?
- Behavior: the extent to which behavior was changed as a result of the training; what's different now?
- Results: real and lasting change that occurred as a result of the training; what results have been achieved?
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