Fundamentals of Human Performance Technology
My creative outlet is not limited to the painting space. When I put my paint brushes down, I pick up my keyboard where I also express my artistic side.
I am currently completing my Masters degree at Concordia University in Educational Technology. This page is an homage to the creative works I completed in my Fundamentals of Human Performance Technology class. Here you will find my reflective process for the three main assignments, in other words, the thoughts behind the keyboard!
Performance Needs Assessment
Performance Needs Assessment was an assignment where we had to conduct a needs assessment for a chosen human performance issue. Based on our readings, we needed to place ourselves in context and simulate how we would conduct a needs assessment. Thankfully, I had previously completed the Consulting and the Fundamentals of Instructional Design courses therefore I came into the assignment with some prior experience.
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HPT skills
If there is anything that I learned from my prior experience is to adopt a "cause-conscious" mindset and avoid a "solution-focused" approach which is what I applied when I worked on my needs assessment. At this stage, we are simply focusing on the root of the issue, we are not looking for solutions which is what I did when I wrote about the problem, fixed my objectives, and developed my cause analysis.
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Academic Writing Skills
Due to my prior experience in previous classes, I believe that my academic writing skills were well developed. For this type of assignment, I stuck to simple and factual expression because a needs assessment needs to be understood by anyone who gets their hands on it. However, I did sprinkle a more personal point of view when describing the performers because we want to remind those working on the project that the performers are real people with real-world challenges.
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Improvements
In retrospect, I would provide more details in my PNA. Details that seem obvious to me are not necessarily clear to someone who is reading it. Therefore, for the sake of transparency, I would include as many details as possible to avoid misunderstandings.
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Click below to check out my assignments. They are placed in the following order: PNA, HLD, DD.
High Level Design
The second assignment for this course was the High Level Design. At this point we have identified the root causes of the performance issues and we are starting to think of solutions at a macro level.
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HPT skills
To help me think of pertinent solutions, I first organized the causes to the performance issues in Chevalier's BEM Model. With this visual, I was able to come up with different interventions that targeted the different root causes. This, along with the objectives that I set, helped me narrow down to the most appropriate solutions.
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Academic Writing Skills
As with the PNA, I adopted straight-forward and factual language to ensure that anyone can understand it. I avoided industry jargon to be as inclusive as possible.
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Improvements
Similar to the PNA, I would have included more details for each intervention. Delving into the specifics of each would have made a more compelling case for them.
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Click below to check out my assignments. They are placed in the following order: PNA, HLD, DD.
Detailed Design
The final assignment was the Detailed Design- the big bad wolf of all assignments! Here, we needed to chose 2 out of the 8 interventions that we came up with and break them down to its smallest detail. We needed to provide details of the intervention itself and how would we evaluate its success both at the formative and summative level.
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HPT Skills
In this program, I learned that older projects will often serve as the skeleton for new projects and therefore we should keep all completed projects filed in a cloud. As a professor once told me, you don't need to always reinvent the wheel! This skill was proven true in this project. I used the skeleton of the questionnaire from my ID project and revamped it to fit what I wanted to assess in this project. I think this is a useful skill moving forward in this field because time is of the essence and learning not to work twice can render work much more efficient. ​
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Academic Writing
As with the PNA and the HLD project, I tried to adopt a clear and straight-forward approach to writing to ensure that the details of the interventions are easily envisioned. However, given that this assignment was done in the context of a university class, APA format was prioritized.
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Improvements
I feel like this was quite a large project and I could have benefited from doing it in pairs. There are lots of details to think about and having two brains bouncing ideas off each other could have made it more well-rounded. I always get this feeling that I am forgetting something and perhaps a partner could have filled that void.
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Click below to check out my assignments. They are placed in the following order: PNA, HLD, DD.