Chapter Title: Introduction
Book Title: Needs Analysis and Programme Planning in Adult Education
Book Author(s): Simona Sava
Published by: Verlag Barbara Budrich
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvbkjvs2.4
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
Unported License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.
Verlag Barbara Budrich is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Needs Analysis and Programme Planning in Adult Education
This content downloaded from
195.195.176.148 on Mon, 24 Apr 2023 12:13:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
1. Introduction
Needs analysis is an important issue wherever educational programmes are
carried out that are designed to attract adults on a purely voluntarily basis,
just by matching their interests and needs.
Such continuing education programmes are frequently perceived as un-
attractive and not sufficiently tailored to learners’ needs and interests, which
is why participation rates in adult education continue to be rather low. As a
consequence, recent policy documents and messages (e.g. European Com-
mission, 2008) stress the need for more systematic and in-depth studies about
adults’ continuing education needs, as well as the need for predictive studies
about the future needs of the labour market, society, and (groups) of adults in
order to be able to adapt educational programming to both of these needs.
Unfortunately, in a lot of adult education institutions, needs analysis is
done in a non-professional manner, based more on the experience, feeling,
and information of the programme planner. Conducting a needs analysis is
often considered a costly, time-consuming, and unreliable activity; thus the
‘trial and error’ principle is still the most common approach when it comes to
designing adult education programmes. Analysing needs may indeed be an
unreliable activity unless it is performed by observing the requirements for
rigorous qualitative analysis that any needs assessor should adhere to, includ-
ing careful reflections on how the identified needs are to be prioritised and
transformed into solution strategies. Moreover, the managers of an educa-
tional institution need to ask for such needs analysis; they have to accept and
back the changes related to needs, because such decisions – like those related
to public relations – are fundamental decisions that also serve to guide strate-
gic management, and hence are the responsibility of the top management.
This book, therefore, is designed as a study guide accompanying the
course on ‘Needs analysis and programme planning’, which has been deliv-
ered online and face to face to an international group of students in the Euro-
pean Master in Adult Education programme for several years. It aims to pro-
This content downloaded from
195.195.176.148 on Mon, 24 Apr 2023 12:13:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
vide readers with suggestions on how they should act as needs assessors and
programme developers. The book was further refined and improved by stu-
dents’ comments and feedback, as well as by discussions with colleagues
from other universities and with practitioners. After all, needs analysis and
programme planning is a very practical thing, which also has to be informed
by research findings, however. This approach was also used for presenting
the various issues and examples with regard to European adult education,
even though the (rather limited) literature available in English mainly comes
from adult education in the United States.
Adult education, as an academic discipline, has to address the issue of
programme planning, as the education of adults is very much about organis-
ing educational provision in a managerial way – that is, to ensure a tailored,
smoothly running programme, able to reach the envisaged learning outcomes,
based on well-defined instructional and marketing plans, as well as well-
designed delivery. Thus the book is geared towards postgraduate students
preparing to become professional adult educators, as well as towards those
intending to plan educational programmes for adults, or acting as middle/ top
managers charged with such responsibility.
However, the study guide is not intended to provide a detailed review of
the existing research on needs analysis; rather, its has been designed in a
more didactic way, seeking to provide basic information to ground such a
complex topic, with some suggestions for further reading. The focus is more
on the relation, more on the link between needs analysis and programme
planning, to raise readers’ awareness of the multiple conditions that have to
be taken into account while sorting and prioritising the data gathered from
needs analysis and translating them into programme ideas. Thus the didactic
concept behind presenting and discussing the various issues is to foster read-
ers’ understanding of the various aspects and types of needs, while progres-
sively adding more information about how, where, from whom, and with
which methods needs can be identified. The exercises and tasks are designed
to be applied to the same target group. Progressively, from one chapter to the
next, other reflections about doing needs analyses and then translating them
into programme planning are added.
The book has two parts. Part One (Chapters 2 to 5) covers the various
types of adult (learning) needs and provides hints (and methods) on how to
identify, analyse, and address these needs. Beginning with the issue of needs
analysis in adult education, the first part presents the typical challenges in-
volved in performing such an analysis. It describes the contexts in which
these needs can be identified, as well as the specificity of the determined
needs, explaining the main methods of identifying them. Moreover, the first
10
This content downloaded from
195.195.176.148 on Mon, 24 Apr 2023 12:13:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
part involves theoretical considerations about the concept and types of needs,
the diagnosing of educational needs, and their theoretical understanding.
Part Two (Chapters 6 and 7) focuses on how to develop programmes tai-
lored to the needs identified, illustrating the necessary steps and the factors to
be considered, in a practical way. The process of programme planning in-
volves multiple factors, mainly related to institutional aims and capacities,
which need to be taken into consideration when designing an educational
programme for adults, both in the planning stage and in the stages of imple-
mentation and evaluation. Finally, the second part provides theoretical con-
siderations and guidelines for the effective planning of educational pro-
grammes for adults.
Chapter 8 offers a number of conclusions, highlighting once more the
main issues and controversies about whether or not to perform needs analyses
to inform programme planning, pointing out the main ideas presented in the
book. For further reflections, clarifications, examples, and points of view,
references to important related works are provided in an annotated bibliogra-
phy.
I would like to offer special thanks to Professor Ekkehard Nuissl at the
University of Duisburg-Essen, the coordinator of the European Master in
Adult Education programme and chair of the DAAD Programme, for his
friendly and constructive feedback while reviewing this book; to Regina
Egetenmeyer, the coordinator of the study guide series, for her patience and
support while I struggled with dividing my time between other commitments
and the finishing of this book; to Carsten Bösel, the copyeditor, for his effort
to put my manuscript into ‘readable’ English; and mainly to my family, for
their big understanding and support.
11
This content downloaded from
195.195.176.148 on Mon, 24 Apr 2023 12:13:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
This content downloaded from
195.195.176.148 on Mon, 24 Apr 2023 12:13:03 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
