Ep 4. Ryan Watkins - Assessing Needs and Big Data

Ryan Watkins, Ph.D. is a Professor at the George Washington University in Washington DC, where he teaches and does research on needs assessments, instructional design, and human-technology collaborations. He is co-host of the podcast Parsing Science, developer of the We Share Science (www.wesharescience.org) platform for sharing video abstracts of scientific research; and maintains the website www.needsassessment.org as a resource site for those conducting needs assessments. In this episode, we discuss what separates a need vs. a want, how technology may be changing this, and how evaluators can take advantage of technological trends in their work.