Background
In the #training Slack channel, the idea for a Needs Analysis raised since early 2019. A more detailed idea of how to approach this came in Slack in mid 2021 and a post titled Learn WordPress: User Survey & Focus Groups reached out to the community to provide their anonymous feedback through a survey and more detailed input via focus groups about the Learn.WordPress.org website.
The work from that project led to this Design Recommendations Report (DRR).
In January 2021, the idea to brainstorm a new learning needs analysis was brought up in the team. During the Contributor Day at WordCamp Europe 2022, the Training Team table began discussing what this could look like. We created this rough draft document to help us shape the questions and define the objective of the needs analysis. From this, the team drafted a Google form document with the questions.
While creating the initial survey drafts, the team noticed that there was too much branching occurring as we focused on creating questions aimed at who we thought are the target audience (e.g.,. if dev -> this question etc). In the end, we felt that it would be better to take a step back and identify first the target audiences and then design specific surveys for the different audiences to gain more details about the different needs people may have from the resources at Learn.WordPress.org. This is how the Individual Learner Survey was born as a first step to a more holistic and targeted Needs Analysis survey.
The Individual Learner survey first existed on Google Forms, but due to GDPR concerns we worked to move it to CrowdSignal. The Individual Learner Survey was launched on Crowdsignal on September 7, 2022.
Project Objectives
- Gather data from the community to determine their WordPress learning needs.
- Analyze the gathered data to formulate an action plan for the resources on Learn WordPress.
- Establish a set of standards for instructional content on Learn WordPress.
Stakeholders
Who are we doing the Needs Analysis for: users, extenders, influencers, and contributors of the WordPress project.
Also visit the post: Who can Learn WordPress help
- Users
- WordPress Open Source Software Project
- Project executive leadership
- Make teams
- Contributors
- Meetup and WordCamp organizers
- Extenders with businesses related to WordPress
- Informal WordPress community gatherings (social media groups, owned forums/events/Slack/socials)
Representation of Stakeholders
The Training Team aspire to have representation from diverse organizations and individuals within and beyond the WordPress ecosystem, including:
- Scale/sizes of organizations
- Locales
- Freelancer marketplace
- Enterprise/agency
- Product and service providers (plugin/theme devs, SaaS, Integrations)
- WP Communicators (bloggers, podcasters, hosts)
- Hiring organizations (contract or employer)
- External trainers/instructors
- Accessibility, Internationalization, and Diversity
- Open Source Software
Tasks
- Planning
- Marketing the survey
- Conducting the survey
- Reviewing and analyzing the survey data
- Discussing the results
- Publishing next steps
Active Project
For more information on the active Needs Analysis project, please see the upcoming Project Thread (to be published shortly after this post. I will edit this post to include the link when it is published).
Thank you to the following people for contributing to this post: @piyopiyofox, @hlashbrooke, @webcommsat, @courane01, @azhiyadev