Know Thy Learners: A Comprehensive Analysis Approach

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SUMMARY

• In the instructional design process for online courses, conducting a comprehensive learner analysis is a crucial step. By delving into learners' characteristics, knowledge levels, learning preferences, and motivations, instructional designers can create tailored and effective learning experiences. It is essential to understand who the learners are and what they already know about the subject matter. Understanding preferred learning styles is a key aspect and helps instructional designers to employ appropriate instructional strategies and create an engaging learning environment. It is also vital to gather data on learners' needs, interests, and key contextual factors to create inclusive and motivating learning environments.

•  Conducting a learner analysis helps instructional designers to bridge the gap by identifying key learner factors that may affect the instructional design process. To gather the necessary information, various techniques such as utilizing pretests, reviewing portfolios of students' work, contacting experienced instructors, and conducting surveys are suggested. Once the data is gathered, instructional designers can make informed decisions based on the learner analysis, allowing them to tailor their instruction to suit the learners' characteristics and needs. Analyzing and reflecting on the information gathered during the learner analysis enables designers to determine the appropriate media and materials to be used in the course effectively.

•  In addition to the factors mentioned above, conducting a comprehensive learner analysis helps in identifying the skill gaps that exist among learners. This knowledge forms the basis of developing personalized learning objectives and outcomes that reflect the unique needs of individual learners. Through learner analysis, instructional designers can also identify the most appropriate technologies, tools, and resources that can be used to enhance the learning experience. This, in turn, helps in determining the structure and content of the online course, ensuring that it is not only effective but also efficient. Therefore, understanding the target learners' needs and characteristics is a crucial step in instructional design. It allows for the creation of tailored course content that caters to diverse learning styles, is engaging, and sets up learners for success.

•  In conclusion, conducting a thorough learner analysis is fundamental in designing an effective online course. By understanding learners' characteristics, preferences, and motivations, instructional designers can create engaging and tailored learning experiences. Techniques such as pretests, portfolio assessments, contacting experienced instructors, and surveys are valuable in gathering the necessary data. The learner analysis serves as a foundation for designing instruction, selecting appropriate media and materials, and ultimately creating a successful online learning environment.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

TRANSCRIPT

Hello, and welcome to the elearning and instructional design for beginners podcast, where new and aspiring instructional designers start, grow and advance their careers and instructional design, and online learning development. I'm your host, Krystal Harper. I'm a former school teacher who transitioned to instructional design, all while working full time as a single mom, would you like to become a successful instructional designer without the burden of earning another degree? Well, then let's get started.
Developing the learner analysis. This is when you find out what students already know about the subject at hand. It might be necessary for you to do research on students by conducting interviews and surveys. If you don't conduct a learner analysis, there's a chance that you are wasting a lot of time and effort. Ask yourself these questions. Who are your students? Are they graduate students, engineers or artists? What are the ages of your students? Why do the students need this course? And what do they already know? Is there a gap in learning? Or is this a refresher course? Is a pretest needed to find out students knowledge level to determine where you need to begin as an instructional designer? If possible, assess your students preferred learning styles? Are they visual learners or do the majority of your students learn best by using kinesthetic auditory or verbal methods? Based on the information you gather? Think about the implications for your instruction to apply more student centered techniques and develop innovative learning environments that utilize a variety of resources. It's often necessary to gather data about your learners needs and interests as well as key contextual factors and to create learning experiences that support more than one learning style. Understanding the learners is a significant factor in designing an online course, the course needs to be designed to support and engage the learners. Conducting a learner analysis can help make a course more productive and effective, as well as increased motivation and the students. instructional designers often do not know much about the target learners, nor do they necessarily know the instructional and or performance setting for which they are designing training. Therefore, a learner analysis is critical for identifying key learner factors that may affect the design of instruction. A learner analysis is important to help shape and guide instruction as well as determine how instruction should be designed. A learner analysis can reveal important variables that may affect the learner and must be addressed during the design and delivery process. This knowledge allows you to tailor your instructional design and delivery approaches to better meet the needs of your learner's learner analysis results provide information about key learner characteristics including prior and prerequisite skills. The information will be used to design appropriate instructional strategies and assessment methods that fit the learner. The better you understand your learners needs, the easier it is to create engaging and motivating learning experiences. Furthermore, by considering how different they learn can ensure they develop lessons and evaluations that address the various needs of multiple learners. Analyzing your learner's, which is stuck for so far too often, way too many assumptions are made about learners. instructional designers often assume that they know how people learn what motivates them to learn and what their attitudes are towards learning. But it's essential that you the instructional designer understands the knowledge that the learners are bringing to the topic, their learning characteristics, previous experiences with the topic and attitudes that they may have towards the topic. In order to apply more learner centric techniques, and develop innovative learning environments that utilize a variety of resources. It's often necessary to gather data about the learners needs and interests as well as key contextual factors. And you also need this to create learning experiences that support more than one learning style. Understanding learners is a significant factor when designing an online course. The course needs to be designed to support and engage the learners. Conducting a learner analysis can help make a course more productive and effective, as well as increased motivation in the learners. instructional designers often don't know much about the target learners, nor do they understand the setting in which they're designing the training. Therefore, a learner analysis is critical for designing key learner factors that may affect the design of the course. A learner analysis is important to help shape and guide the course as well as determine as to how the course needs to be designed. The analysis can reveal important variables that may affect the learner and these things must be addressed during the design and delivery process. This knowledge will allow you to tailor your instructional design and delivery approaches to better meet the needs of your learners. A learner analysis will also provide you information about prior and prerequisite skills. So the better you understand the learners needs, the easier it is to create engaging and motivating learning experiences. I'll teach you how to develop and conduct a learner analysis, what to include in your learner analysis, and also how to acquire and utilize the learner analysis data. The information that you gather from your learner analysis will be used to develop appropriate instructional strategies and assessment methods that fit the learners, which are the next two steps in my 12 step process. Before you start designing your online course, it is essential that you have an understanding of learning styles and preferences. Below I have listed some of the components that you should complete during the analysis. General characteristics describe the characteristics of the class as a whole include information regarding the number of students cultural, ethnic, or other types of diversity, and socio economic factors. Learning Styles describe the learning style preferences of the individual students such as auditory visual, or kinesthetic, then determine their information processing habits. In other words, how do students approach cognitive processing of information? prerequisites? Do the students have the knowledge required to complete this module? Do they have the entry competencies and have knowledge of the technical vocabulary required? Do they have any biases or misconceptions about the subject motivators finally determine the motivational and psychological factors of students consider things such as their achievement or social motivations, anxiety or cautiousness, and competitiveness. The aspects that should be included in the learner analysis includes entry behaviors, prior knowledge of the topic, attitudes, general academic motivation, educational and ability level, and learning styles. Now let's talk more about each of these aspects in more detail. Entry behaviors are special skills and knowledge that learners must possess prior to instruction to accomplish the specified goal, because they will not necessarily be covered in the instruction. These prerequisite skills and knowledge may be related directly to the content or may be associated with the delivery system. During your learner analysis, you are determining if learners possess the entry behaviors and noting implications for instructional design, delivery and or evaluation. prior knowledge of the topic. This category includes knowledge that your learners already possess on which they can contribute to build new skills. This is also important so that instruction can build and relate to prior knowledge and so time spent instructing students based on learning new material as opposed to teaching an area in which they are already familiar. It also provides an opportunity to see if learners possess discrepancies or misconceptions about the topic so that they can be clarified during instruction. Unlike entry behaviors, prior knowledge focuses on the instructional topic and describe skills and knowledge relative to the topic in general. Entry behaviors concentrate on those skills and knowledge learners must have prior to instruction to accomplish the goal that may or may not be directly related to the primary instructional topic. You need to address learners feelings about subject matter and skills to be learned.

Included in this area should be learners perceived levels of attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction toward the content information to be covered by the course. The ARCS model of motivational design, attention relevance, confidence and satisfaction helps systematically analyze the motivation of students following these four steps, and this model enables effectively support motivation level of learners. Learners attitudes towards content information and towards the delivery system are motivational factors that are better analyzed using the ARCS model of motivational design, and that learners motivation to learn or general academic motivation should be considered as more of a motivational trait than a state. A person's self reported attitudes are thought to be as indicators of their motivation. For instance, students perceived levels of attention relevance, competence and satisfaction are believed to represent their attitudes towards instruction in specific situations rather than in general. It is suggested that instructional designers address arcs when describing learners motivation for instruction. In general, are students motivated to learn what D motivates them in general, educational and ability level? Information for this area can be gathered through interviews and observations, records and test data. Questions that designers want to answer may include information about the capability of learners to master the material that will be presented. how able are the students to learn the new material? What educational experiences do they have? Learning Styles refers to how individuals learn best. The three basic learning styles and learning strategies for learners are auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. What you may not realize is that today, there are well over 40 different models that are used for describing learning styles. Most models have similar components and are derived from the Minnesota multifaceted Personality Inventory, or MMPI. This test has been used by medical professionals since the 1930s to diagnose mental disorders and help to identify an individual's personality structure. The model identifies the following four different types of learners, active and reflective learners, those who want to discuss or be active right away versus wanting to think about things and then reflectively respond, sensing and intuitive learners, sensors like being grounded by facets and intuitive prefer possibilities and imagination, visual and verbal learners. Visual learners like to see information represented via charts, diagrams and pictures, and verbal learners prefer to hear the information sequential and global learners. Sequential learners prefer small steps in the learning process and global learners prefer the whole picture and working downwards. We all have these characteristics of learning and so to our learners. However, we all differ in the degree to which we prefer one type of learning over the other. It is important to understand there's no right or wrong type of learning style. Each learning style has advantages and disadvantages. It becomes important to understand how different learning styles respond to different methods. Data about learners in this area can be gathered through interviews, observations and attitude data that may be gathered through questionnaires. Questions that can be asked about learners would include what kind of learning mode do the learners prefer? Do they prefer traditional lecture or discussion format? Are the learners willing to explore other formats. To conduct a complete learner analysis, you must either know or gather information about your learners. This information is not always readily available. Several techniques can be used to assist your search for this information. These techniques include, utilize pretests, review portfolios, contact experienced instructors, or survey students. You may need to apply one or more of these techniques to gather all the information necessary to complete a thorough learner analysis. Let's talk a little bit more about each of these techniques. A pretest is a criterion referenced tests designed to measure entry behaviors or prerequisite skills needed before instruction can begin. As well as those skills the designer intends to teach. It gives the instructional designer a basis for developing items or skills that need to be taught to ensure successful instruction. portfolio assessment is one of the most common formats for evaluation. Portfolios contain samples of work that demonstrate student achievement of targeted outcomes, objectives and proficiencies. Select samples of work that illustrate students strengths and weaknesses and make instructional design decisions based on these samples. possible sources for student portfolio examples include the following written reports, exams of student knowledge, peer reviews, self evaluations, audio and video recordings, images and graphics, research papers, and projects. Contact with former instructors can be either written or verbal. It can give you valuable insights on study habits, learning styles, attitudes, or motivation of your courses typical learners a survey is a useful tool for gaining valuable information about your learners. It can be used to obtain general information about the student background training, prior education, etc. As well as information about current attitudes. entry competencies, motivators and learning styles. Popular survey formats include questionnaires and checklists. Although this can be more challenging in elearning, you need to plan flexible instruction that allows for student to student interaction and student to instructor interaction, including asynchronous or synchronous if possible, whole class and small group discussions can help facilitate and stimulate active student participation. It is very important to create a positive learning environment in which the learners feel comfortable and at ease. How to utilize your data. Once all this data is gathered, you can now make certain implications about the learners ask yourself, because I know this characteristic about the learners I will do blank. The implication should allow you to focus your instruction to best suit the needs of the learners. For example, because I know that the learners are visual learners, I will describe the instruction to include diagrams, pictures and charts to aid the learning process. Or because I know the learners are not very motivated about the instruction, I will design instruction to ensure that all aspects of the ARCS model are covered. Or because I know that learners do not have the prior skills or knowledge are expected, I will design my instructions for the I teach or review the necessary skills. You should analyze and reflect on the information of your learner analysis for the design, delivery and evaluation of your instruction. This will help you determine the appropriate media and materials for your course.
In conclusion, this course summarize the key concepts associated with conducting an analysis of your learner techniques for gathering the data were also described as well as how to analyze the results. This analysis should then be compiled into a report that can be used by team members during the design phase of the process. Be sure to download the learner analysis worksheet to use and refer to and gathering this information.