In this section, we're going to look a learner analysis in terms of instructional design. But one, we'll be focusing on the differences and similarities among our learner population. So, here is again the Addie model for instructional design processes. In terms of learner analysis, we are here as the first stage of the Addie model. So, why learner analysis? Wat is the important for instructional designers to understand the value as well as the processes of conducting learner analysis? First, learner analysis will tell us about our learners and how they prefer to learn in different environments. Learner analysis also will help us scope the intended learning task and learning environments, this is within individual learning module or instructional unit. Third, learner analysis will tell us where our learners are in reference to the intended learning objectives as well as learning goals. Finally, learner analysis will tell us in terms of the scope of our design efforts. This is in reference to the overall instructional design efforts, sometimes it's beyond individual units. Here is a relevant quote, "A common error resulting from failure to analyze the characteristics of an audience is assuming that all learners are alike. An even more common era is assuming that the learners are like the designers.'' So, the first part of the statement speaks to the fact that learners are different among themselves. Second part of statement reminds us that learners oftentimes are very very different from designers of the instructional units. So, in terms of the information we will like to collect from a learner analysis, first of all, generally speaking, we would like to know who they are in terms of gender, age groups, educational backgrounds, ethnicities, ratio backgrounds, disability status, socio-economic status and other relevant social stratification factors? As much information as we can collect, the more information we're able to collect, the better we will get the value of the learner analysis. The second component would like to know for learner analysis is what are the cognitive, psychomotor, effective, and social characteristics of the learners? Basically, this category of information will tell us what our learners might be able to do before receiving the instructions, and to what extent they can accommodate to the exploitation of the instruction we're about to design. The third category would be the information from the analysis can help us determine; first, what instructional content might be needed. Sometimes, maybe the learners already have certain level of skill, knowledge, or ability we might need to revisit the initial scoping of the instructional unit. Sometimes we need to add more content, sometimes we can trim the content down a little bit. Second part of it, we will figure it out, based on the information from the learner analysis in terms of the question we should begin the instruction. This is more relevant to the previous point. But this is more for the instructional designers, where we can really focus our efforts when we begin the design processes. Here is the in-video question for you, what information do instructional designers need to know about the learner population? In ideal situation of course, so come up with ideas as many as you can, based on your experiences, based on your own experiences as learners in order to respond to this in-video question. So, while we would like to know more specifically about the learner population. Useful information might be including the following; first will be the prior knowledge or experiences the topic area according to a learner's response or reporting. Second, attitudes toward the content area and the potential delivery system. This is more relevant to today's online learning environments for example, to some extent will learners be comfortable for instance, receiving or interacting with learning environments in a mobile learning environments, receiving and interacting with contents from their mobile devices. So, we should not assume that all learners are comfortable doing that in this day and age. We still need to figure out to what extent will they be willing to receive instruction interacting with learning environment in different types of technology-enabled systems. Next will be their motivation to learn. We will touch on a little bit more later on in today's section. Motivation drives everything we do, motivation also will drive everything your learners will be doing, is a key factor we need to understand in terms of learner analysis. What are your learners educational levels and their ability levels? So, this type of information we can often get from, for instance, standardized tests results. A little bit more generalizable, they will provide a strong background information to initiate the learner analysis processes. The next one will be learners general learning preferences. How would our learners prefer to interact with learning environments? Let's go back to the early example of mobile learning environments. Some learners will be more likely to learn or to interact with the content through their mobile devices, some learners might not be feeling comfortable doing so. So, that will also deal with their preferences in terms of how they prefer to read, how they prefer to watch videos online, how they prefer to interact with their peers in different types of learning environments. Learner's attitudes toward the organization or the providers of the content also is an important factor. This is a more of a culturally relevant consideration. We can ask learners in terms of to what design they will feel comfortable interacting with the content provided by certain organizations, certain institutions, and this is an important bit information we would like to collect if possible. The final item will be what I call group characteristics. So, this could be as general as their age group capabilities within the population. For instance, if you are designing instructions for a group of college students, their group characteristics will be very, very different from designing instruction for a group of retirees. So, those are very important information we like to collect, and to a large extent, they can also tell you the general representation among your learners. To be more specific, we also like to look at learners cognitive, physiological, affective, and social aspects of their characteristics. In terms of the cognitive, we'd like to know where their mental capacities might be, their abilities to memorize information for instance. Sometimes it's relevant to the intended instruction and learning objective, sometimes it's not. So, really again, you need to look at your learning objectives and to see the role of their cognitive abilities. In general, cognitive abilities, we will like learners to be able to perform basic skills, memorization being one, being able to differentiate concepts, being able to apply newly acquired skills, knowledge, and abilities. Those are general cognitive abilities we would like to see from our learners. But again, it depends on the scope and the depth of the learning goals and objectives. Physiological aspect, this is more relevant if the learning objectives are associated with certain type of demonstration through physical activities. Age groups, for one, will tell you something about that. You can easily see the difference in terms of physical strength between a group of 20-30 years old with a group of perhaps more than 60 years old. So, that's just physical capabilities as they become relevant to the intended learning objectives. Affective, this is relevant to the earlier point that we need to figure out learner's perceptions, one part of it will be toward the provider of the instruction. Also, is important for us to figure out learner's general attitudes toward the topics, sometimes due to personal belief, sometimes due to other social factors, learners might feel strongly about certain topics that you intend to cover with instruction. It's always nice to know as early as we can so we can incorporate those considerations into the design of our instruction. The social aspect of the learner analysis will be more relevant if your instruction is situated in teamwork context. To what extent would our learners be comfortable working with peers in a face-to-face setting versus in any synchronous online setting? So, that's just one of the information bit we would like to get if teamwork or working with peers seems to be an important part of the instruction delivery. So, these are four major and relatively basic components of learner characteristic we will like to collect from the learner analysis stage. Here's a table to show similarities in terms of the group of learners and differences among individual learners. That's the horizontal part of the table. The vertical part of it, you can see the stable and the changing aspects. So, if you combine the two, you have the two by two, four combinations to begin with. First combination would be similarities within the group that are relatively stable. So, their sensory capabilities, their preference to process information, their conditions for learning. So, those are three characteristics you can relatively see as they are stable within group of learners. The second category, if you will, let's look at the differences among individuals that are stable learner characteristics. First of all, they're their aptitudes. You can get that information from, for instance, standardized test results. Second will be their cognitive styles, their habits when interacting with information. Third one will be their psychosocial traits. That will be the results of your learner's interactions with social environments, so that has been accumulated for a while. Therefore, they are relatively stable. Your learner's gender, ethnicity, racial backgrounds, those are also stable characteristics among individual learners. Know your socioeconomic status, so this is the short list of the stable learner differences among individuals. Let's look at the next one, will be the changing similarities in the group of learners. The first one will be their developmental processes. Earlier, we talked about John Piaget's work, if you can recall, the idea will be based on different experiences with social interactions learner's developmental stages might be similar to each other assuming that they are interacting with similar social environments. So, we can look at their intellectual, they can look at language abilities, their psychosocial behaviors, as well as moral standard. You can identify this category of learner characteristics for a group of learners to begin with due to their similarities, and it's the changing part of it that's different from the stable aspect of it. The next category would be the changing differences among individual learners. First one will be their developmental state. So, in the previous category, we looked at their developmental processes. A group of learners can go to similar developmental processes. For instance, they have gone through certain schooling. However, the outcome of the developmental process might be different among individuals. Therefore, these are changing differences among individual learners in terms of their intellectual levels as one of their developmental state. Learner's prior learning, again, to what extent your learners individually chose to engage with learning activities? That also might be very different among individual learners. You might have a group of 30 learners intended by the instruction, and depending on their prior learning experiences, their responses to your instruction might be different. In terms of prior learning, these are two additional quotes just to emphasize its importance, for instance, to design. One is from Ausubel,1968. "If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle, I will say this: The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him or her accordingly." Here's another one. "The most important factor for a designer to consider about the audience is specific prior learning." Specific prior learning in this context will be learner's prior learning relevant to the intended learning objectives. So, these two quotes again showed us the importance as prior learning, and we should try our best to gathering this information as much as we can during the learner analysis process. Another crucial factor when it comes to learner analysis is learner's motivational state. Learner's motivational state goes beyond, or you can consider the motivational state will be relevant to all four categories of the learner characteristics we discussed earlier. Why is motivation important when it comes to a learner analysis? Because motivational states will control learners and direct their flow of efforts during the learning processes. Motivation to learn, could be situational, is somewhat complex and it's a changing characteristics among individuals. It's important because it initiates, and more crucially, it sustains the learning processes carried out by the learners. In terms of learner's cognitive effort investment, in terms of learners emotional engagement to the learning processes, to the learning text, those are both relevant for us to understand learner's motivational state. In terms of motivational support in instructional design, unfortunately motivational support is often neglected during the instructional design process. Although it is feasible for motivational support to be realized through instructional strategies, in order to elicit curiosity, relevance of the learning task, the confidence from learners, and the overall satisfaction from the learning experience. Jiang Keller's work, ARCS motivational design model, is a good reference point if you're interested in learning more about motivational support and how we can design them into instruction. In his work, attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction are four important components for us to devise instructional strategies for effective motivational support. Motivational support is also a multidimensional construct. People like to use intrinsic and extrinsic to differentiate the source of the information and the outcome of the motivational support. Interesting motivation is ideally internalized. Learners would carry out intended learning processes, participating in learning tasks without any external reward or incentives, which would be the extrinsic part of the motivation. Ideally, we would like to see learners to develop intrinsic motivation throughout their learning experience. However, extrinsic motivation in terms of rewards and incentives also play an important role in initiating the intended learning processes. So, the reality check for this section. First, learner analysis is important. We all know that the value of a learner analysis, but perhaps not implementable in some contexts, especially when you're working with a large group of learners, or learners are dispersed among different locations. Second, learner diversity is important and needs to be understood and incorporate into instructional deliverables. The diversity aspect of a learner analysis can be referred to our earlier mention, in terms of learner's gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability status, and relevant social stratification factors. Third, some learner characteristic information could be gathered through standardized test results, and usually that will tell you about learner's general aptitudes. In terms of their generalized ability, we need to be cautious when applying those information to understand our learners. Finally, motivational support is crucial, but often neglected for many reasons. For one, again, in order to understand learner's motivational state, we need to devise instruments and spend more time to collect that aspect of data, and the logistics of it sometimes is the major limiting factor. Nevertheless, it is important to understand your learner's motivational state, therefore we can design relevant and effective motivational support.
