EAC 583 Needs Assessment and Task Analysis in Training and Development This assignment was a group project

t focused on a university-wide transition from one Learning Management System (LMS) to another. It was interesting and challenging because we had to work together as a group, create actual data gathering tools, use those tools on real respondents, and analyze the information gathered to produce what we believed would be the most appropriate and effective methods to ease the transition and teach the users about the new LMS. This project closely resembled a real-world project and, in fact, was based on an actual transition that occurred at NC State a few years ago. As a result, we had to consider all of the potential stakeholders involved in the transition. The methods we were promoting had to be effective, but they also had to be amenable to administrators, service technicians, customer support personnel, and others in terms of financial, temporal, and other resources. We also needed to discover what the final users the college professors considered to be the biggest problems they would face and how those issues compared to what we thought would be important factors to manage. Our group was able to deeply delve into the course design process. We worked as a unit to not just throw together a course that we thought would be effective, but to actually create a program based on data that we knew would produce results. In this project, we were able to put theory into practice. By taking a realistic problem and creating one of many potential solutions, I learned a lot about the course design process and working as a team to accomplish this process. Unfortunately, we were never able to implement our plan and test its validity or effectiveness, which would have been the final step in the process before modifying it as required for future utility. Still, course design is at the heart of the training profession and the ability to practice and refine that skill through this assignment was invaluable. The lessons learned and applied will remain with me throughout my career.