As we design increasingly complex systems, we run up against fundamental limitations of human imagination. To support practice, it becomes essential to use authentic data and algorithms as design materials to augment designers' intuitions. Recent work has explored some dimensions of using data as a design material, suggesting the contours of a new…

The future of human performance technology (HPT) will be bright or dismal depending on how well HPT practitioners focus on careful and practical answers to three pivotal questions: What is good practice in human performance technology? What are the differences between good practice and bad? What are the connections between good research and…

The process of improving organizational performance through designing systemic interventions has remarkable similarities to designing instruction for improving learners' performance. Both processes deal with subjects (learners and organizations correspondingly) with certain capabilities that are exposed to novel information designed for producing…

Despite the recent push to design and adopt educator evaluation systems, many states and local educational agencies (LEAs) have focused primarily on teacher evaluations and lack the appropriate attention to design and implementation of school leader evaluations and aligned professional development. And, since principals are responsible for…

The performance improvement field has evolved from the work of professionals seeking to improve performance in the workplace. Each time the field has evolved, it has done so by consistently expanding its scope and incorporating a broader performance context in line with its systems-theory roots. But just how much has performance improvement…

Historically, the early childhood care and education (ECCE) workforce has been characterized as a low-education, low-compensation, low-stability workforce. In recent years, considerable investments have been made to correct this, but we lack evidence about the extent to which these investments were accompanied by changes in the characteristics of…

The launch of HealthCare.gov, the website of the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare), was a major public relations disaster for the Obama administration. This case examines some of the factors that contributed to the failure of the launch and then details how Optum, an information technology service provider, considered the opportunity provided by…

In this paper, we consider scholarly work on early career teacher attrition, and retention, from 1999 to 2010. Much of the literature has framed attrition as either a problem associated with individual factors (e.g., burnout), or a problem associated with contextual factors (e.g., support and salary). Some recent conceptualizations consider early…

The growing trends of tiered reference, roving librarians, and virtual reference offer academic libraries several options for providing the most effective reference service. Increased enrollment at community colleges has prompted a reconsideration of how librarians can balance reference, teaching, and faculty responsibilities. This article…

Web usability focuses on design elements and processes that make web pages easy to use. A website for college students was evaluated for underutilization. One-on-one testing, focus groups, web analytics, peer university review and marketing focus group and demographic data were utilized to conduct usability evaluation. The results indicated that…

Efficient use of resources, including space, is critical in academic departments. Traditional space auditing simply assesses occupancy levels. We present a novel approach which assesses not just the extent to which space is used, but also how well it is used. We link space use quantitatively to key performance indicators in a research-intensive…

In early 2011, the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) invited three universities--University of North Carolina, Charlotte; Purdue University; and Wayne State University--to participate in the third annual University Human Performance Technology (HPT) Case Study Competition. Each university put together a team of three or four…

Student workload is a contributing factor to students deciding to withdraw from their study before completion of the course, at significant cost to students, institutions and society. The aim of this paper is to create a basic workload model for a group of undergraduate students studying business law units at Curtin University in Western…

Most research and conceptualizing of training transfer assumes that the content of the training is irrelevant in whether or not or to what extent transfer is successful. The singular perspective that all training is the same when it comes to issues of training transfer is misguided. This is especially true for the types of training that have been…

A substantial body of literature has highlighted many factors that impede faculty change, the most common of which are a lack of training, time, and incentives. However, there may be other barriers--unacknowledged and unexamined barriers--that might prove to be equally important. In particular, the tensions between a scientist's professional…