Welcome to ryanrwatkins.com
Research, teaching, and consulting on needs assessment, human and organizational performance improvment, e-learning readiness, and instructional design for distance education.
Improving both human and organizational performance is typically a worthwhile, valuable, and often valiant effort. Improvement efforts will routinely bring about "bottom-line" benefits for your organization, and they will likewise regularly change lives within your organization. After all, improving performance isn’t just about improving productivity; it can also lead to increased job satisfaction, longer retention, improved the quality of life for employees, less stress, new social networks, retained knowledge, and numerous benefits that impact on the individuals that make up all organization as much as the organization itself and the society that the organization serves.
These beneficial results, nevertheless, rarely happen by chance alone. Systematic and continual efforts to improve both human and organizational performance are required to ensure success. My research, teaching, and consulting focuseson one critical process in any performance improvement effort: the needs assessment. From developing theories to guide needs assessment applications to how to decide what actions to take when needs are identified, my needs assessment work includes topics associated with collecting useful information, making informed decisions, and improving valued performance.
Having taught in distance education for over a decade, I also do a fair amount of writing, research, and consulting on topics associated with instructional design and e-learning readiness. From authoring the best-selling E-Learning Companion textbook to creating an online self-assessment of organizational readiness for e-learning, my work in distance education has guided much of my career.