Mirjam Neelen & Paul A. Kirschner

As Richard Clark points out in his most recent video interview with Guy Wallace: We, as learning designers, are notoriously weak when it comes to the analysis phase of the learning design process. Specifically, he’s referring to the fact that we don’t use cognitive task analysis (CTA) as often as we should. It’s an overlooked and for some an unknown tool. CTA uses various strategies to capture both the explicit and implicit knowledge that experts use to carry out complex tasks. We do this in order to harvest information about the knowledge, thought processes, and goal structures that are needed to carry out a task and that underlie observable task performance (Chipman, Schraagen, & Shalin, 2000).

There are many possible reasons why we’re not using CTA as much as we should and we could fill multiple blogs with the overall state of our profession…