Audience – The Dominant Factor in Learning Effectiveness?

The elevator stopped at the ninth floor, jolting Radha out of her reverie. It was time for her to unplug herself from the thoughts of her personal life, and plug into what she called her professional self. Her professional self comprised a different attitude and it brought to the fore a different set of skills – skills that she locked into a mental safe, the moment she stepped out of the office elevator and got into her car in the underground parking. For Radha, her workdays were made with a cookie-cutter that had lost its shape long back!

Today, however, was going to be different. It was going to be the beginning of a three-day training program on the processes that would be used for the new project and she was expecting it to be boring and completely unproductive. The trainer had flown in from Kentucky, was an American, and everyone expected him to be completely out-of-sync with the Indian culture. Nevertheless, training the trainers, who’d later be training the execs, wasn’t going to be easy for him – they’d put him under the microscope - figuratively speaking! Who knows, the day might after all turn out to be interesting; training effectiveness, however, was a different matter altogether – it would depend on whether the American had done his homework!

Do you know the single most important thing that the American should’ve done to ensure that his training stayed effective and that his audience stayed interested in the content instead of putting him under the microscope?

Of course you do. He should’ve learned about his audience. You knew the answer to this question all the time – didn’t you? What you probably want to know now is – what should he have learned about the audience and how he could’ve used that knowledge to ensure learning effectiveness. So let’s come straight to the point and figure it all out.

We (and of course, our fictional American Trainer too) need to learn about the audience because it impacts the content selection, the instructional strategy, and the content presentation. Did you see the three main tasks of a trainer embedded in there? I did say:

• Content Selection
• Instructional Strategy
• Content Presentation

Let us see how.

Content Selection:
Common sense tells us if we want our learner to do a job, we should train the learner on the new skills that he/she needs to learn to accomplish the given task. This obviously means that we should know:

1. The skills needed to accomplish the task.
2. The skills the learner already possesses.

So, 1 minus 2 would be the new skills that the learner should learn. But, we just can’t figure it out unless we are aware of the existing skills or entry skills of the learner.

Thus, select the content on the basis of the majority of your audience. Remember that if you go by the lowest common denominator approach, you’d end up killing the motivation in most of your learners (provided there are only a few with lower level skills.) In such cases, you should structure your training programs using the greatest common factor approach, and try to reach the less skilled by providing them some basic pre-training guidance, thus, god-willing ensuring a more homogeneous group for your training program.

Thus, your content selection shouldn’t be based on all the skills needed but on the new skills required by your majority audience.

Instructional Strategy:
After you’ve selected your content, you now need to decide upon an instructional strategy, which will ensure that the learning transfer stays effective. Instructional strategy primarily focuses upon selecting the right examples, activities, and exercises that would make learning effective – keeping in mind the content and the audience. The problem that plagues most of our learning transfer endeavors is that we focus too much on the content and too little on the audience.

So what is it about our audience that we should worry about while deciding upon the instructional strategy? The quick answer is the psychographics. However, the novice learner should be dealt differently from the expert learner.

If you are training novice learners (which obviously doesn’t seem to fit Radha’s profile,) you need to remember that their content-relevant schema is either absent or very weak. Thus, you need to dig deeper into their psychographics, and pick examples and scenarios from their possible backgrounds/lifestyles.

If you have expert learners as your audience (such as Radha and her colleagues, who have been doing process trainings for a while now, and need to learn only about the “new” features/procedures of the new process,) you can narrow down your example-selection field to your audience’s content-specific schema. Note that the “how” of training is different from the “what” of training. Don’t confuse the selection of the examples and associations with the selection of the content. You can also include some discussion and exploration activities, which will enable the participants to feel more in control of their learning.

Content Presentation:
The third important part of the content creator/trainer’s job is to present the content. Note that the content presentation in on-ground trainings is very different from that through the eLearning medium. However, the importance of the audience remains the same in both cases.

As an on-ground trainer, you would like to delve deeper into the attitude (which is a part of the psychographics) of the learner and determine whether the entire learner community has some common likes/dislikes, and what would be most neutral way of connecting with them. You would also like to review the demographics in the correct cultural context. You will want to balance the interactive activities with the non-interactive ones, ensure that your practice activities are immediately relevant, and that your feedback is constructive from the learning viewpoint of your learners. For example, a group of senior individuals may require a lot more support in computer-based activities; however, they may be averse to acknowledging the same.

As an eLearning content creator, you have the advantage of not having the risk extemporization, but on the other hand, your content would be delivered as the written word, and so you would have fewer opportunities to amend a mistake, after the content has been delivered. The demographics and the psychographics of your audience would help you ensure that your presentation follows the required readability guidelines, uses language that is appropriate for the target audience, doesn’t touch the taboo topics, and so on.

Radha left the elevator at GL-2, and walked to her car. She was feeling lighter and happier. The Trainer had done his homework. He didn’t waste their time taking them through the basic features of the software, giving them a few minutes to explore it on their own instead. He also engaged them into discussions, and helped them differentiate the new process with the other processes that they had trained upon in the past.

She turned the ignition on and smiled. Tomorrow was going to be another productive yet fun-filled day!

Author: Shafali R. Anand

(Read other articles by the author in Wavelength's Articles Section)