2. Plan

2.5 Know your audience

Why is it important?

The fundamental step towards meaningful learning material development is to identify the learners. Analyze your audience. What motivates them? What capabilities do they have? What do they lack? Can they co-tutor in a learning session? What eLearning format will be best for your audience: synchronous, asynchronous or blended learning? Are your learners senior-level managers? Are they end-users? A basic blunder most novice instructional designers commit is insulting the intelligence of the learner. Exercise caution with senior managers. The instructional designer should double as the course facilitator. Design learning materials that enable them to investigate a problem and arrive to multi-perception solutions. The goal here is to facilitate and not preach. If blended or synchronous format is not possible, create highly interactive and branched scenarios for the asynchronous format. The conclusion of the course should be an opportunity for the instruction developer to improve learning materials based on discussions during the course.

There are a couple of essential questions regarding the audience you need to ask yourself before creating a course:

Fasten your seat belts! In the upcoming sections, we will elaborate all elements of eLearning and instruction design. By the time you complete this eBook, you will be inspired to create and offer the course that has been brewing in your mind.

Did we warn you that this experience will spur a cycle of intense creativity?

How to collect raw content?