Identify your audience

This is one post in a collection of six, detailing different steps in course planning. See the main Course planning post for links to each of the stages.

When you're designing a course you're trying to reach actual people. So before you start making the course, you’ll need to spend some time thinking about who the course is for. 

Identifying your audience means you can really target the course, making it relevant (and valuable) to them.

Figure out who your learners are

We recommend getting a group together to brainstorm all you know about your target audience - your learners. Ideally these are people "close" to the learners. For instance your group might include those who: 

• have taught this course before, 
• are potential employers, or
• are involved in marketing.

Note: Ideally this process also incorporates actual data about learners (or potential learners) rather than just anecdotal evidence, but we realise that time and budget may not always allow for gathering data before building your first courses.

We like to start by drawing just a rough outline of a human figure. Then we use the questions below to generate discussion (recording the salient points).

We’ve created a set of slides with the questions below so you can just plug and play when you get your team together to brainstorm. 

Demographics and background

• What age are our learners?
• What genders?
• What are the main ethnicities and cultures?
• Education and training background?
• Employment situation?
• Experiences they're likely to have had?
• Current skill level/prior knowledge of course content?

Goals and motivations

• Where do our learners want to get to? 
• What does success look like for them?
• What will they take with them when they finish the course?
• What motivates them?
• What reasons will they have to continue and complete the course?
• What activities or hobbies do they enjoy?

Barriers and challenges

• What might get in the way of learners’ success?
• What are their challenges?
• What are the stumbling blocks in terms of their own skills and abilities, the resources available, other people (especially stakeholders), and even the constraints of time and space?
• What barriers will they have to engagement? 
• What barriers will they have to achievement?

Engagement and strengths

• How do we envisage learners will work through the course?
• What strengths will they bring to their learning?
• How does the learner like to operate: alone, in a group, or some other way?
• Do they like to do and build things or do they like to read and think about things?

At the end of this process, you hopefully have an idea of the range of learners (and learner attributes) your course design will need to cater for.

Some people like to use these to create learner personas. These can be a really useful tool for your teams to understand your learners, but can take time and data to build properly, so we find many of our partners choose to just create a simple statements of design requirements (as seen in the next section).

Define the design requirements

Once you've done your brainstorm, it's time to take the answers to these questions and turn it into what it means for your course design. You may find it useful to capture sentiments or attributes and respective design requirements as something like this:

Many learners are new to learning online.

So we can... Encourage learners to think about the general learning skills they bring, and help them to think about how they might transfer into the online learning space. 

Some learners may think “What? Not another programme!” 

So we can... Ensure explicit links to strategic direction and explain or show learners what’s in it for them.

Learners are unlikely to have large blocks of time to devote to this programme at once and are often juggling many other commitments.

So we can... Ensure content and tasks should be broken into 15-25 minute, clearly defined “chunks” with clear summaries and reminders of previous topics via internal links and offer flexibility for any due dates/deadlines.

By doing this, you end up with a sort of "rule book" to follow as you design the course. Things that, if you follow them, are more likely to mean your learners are engaged, challenged and supported in the way they need.

Where to next?

If you've completed identifying your audience as your first step in planning, and you're wondering "where to next?", a great next step is to look for themes in your design requirements and pull these together to define the flavour. Check out our article Course planning - Define the flavour.

If you have completed some of the other steps, then the design requirements and your view of learner needs are perfect to check and compare with the outcomes and flavour to see that yes, they would meet your learners' needs.