PROJECT OVERVIEW

This project was developed as part of my Human Performance Technology (ETEC 651) coursework in Winter 2025. It was a three-part project that focused on a performance problem at a fictional university called Neo Stella University in Toronto. 

I took on the fictional role of an instructional designer working in the Office of Institutional Effectiveness and conducted a performance needs analysis, proposed interventions to close the performance gap, and created detailed designs for some non-instructional interventions.

• Performance Needs Assessment

• High Level Design

• Detailed Design

THE PROCESS

After watching a few webinars by Carl Binder, I decided to use frameworks from The Performance Thinking Network, specifically the Performance Chain Model and the Six Boxes® Model (The Performance Thinking Network, 2022) to analyze the performance problem.

The Performance Chain Model was extremely helpful in figuring out the performance gap. I analyzed the performance problem starting with the business objective (what’s at stake?), then moved on to the performance objectives (work outputs), then to the ideal performance task list (behaviour), and then finally the cause analysis (influences on behaviour).

When I started to map out all the influences on behaviours, both positive and negative, the performance gap started to take form. I looked at the Positive and Negative Behavior Influences tables in The Performance Thinking Network (2022) and the root causes in the Intervention Classification System table in Sanders (2001) for help at identifying possible root causes. The table in Sanders (2001) mapped to Gilbert’s BEM, so it was very easy to map it to the Six Boxes® Model.

After identifying the root causes, it was time to start planning the possible interventions, both instructional and non-instructional. A roadmap was created to show the progression of the different interventions across time and across silos.