Affectively Yours

Audience – is the Royalty! Statements of this intent are often heard and made in the content development community. This doesn’t mean that the content developer should become obsequious, but that the audience should be understood and addressed in a language that they are comfortable with. Let us review creation to understand how important the audience is to the creator.

The process of creation is extremely fulfilling. Creation of all kinds, including visual and literary works, makes the creator of these works special. The creator, by the very act of creation transcends into a higher plane of satisfaction, which is that of creating something immortal. Yet someone other than its creator either dubs the creation immortal or condemns it to death. Yes! It is the audience that decides the fate of any creation!

It is the audience that either raises its index finger or lets it fall…in the arena of creativity, the audience decides whose creation would survive. What is common in Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Tolkien, Robin Cook, John Grisham, and JK Rowling; is their capability to create content that won their audience’s approval. Often I wonder if these authors were to write instructional content, would they not do marvelously well? The answer is tough to arrive at. The instructional designer as well as the fiction author, both work under different sets of constraints; and thus should be equipped with different abilities.

The instructional designer’s constraints can be summarized as: content type, medium, and language; on the other hand, the most difficult part of a fiction writer’s job is the requirement to write for a large group of individuals – or a very diverse audience profile. On a slightly different note - a question that many instructional designers ask is – how do you make content interesting for a very diverse audience? I think, if we review what the fiction writers do to accomplish this feat, our writing could benefit a lot.

But before we begin with anything, let us determine what audience analysis means to an instructional designer.

We all know that Dr. Bloom and his associates classified learning into the cognitive, affective and the psychomotor domains. Learning in any of the three domains takes place through a combination of skills from all the domains. Let us confine this discussion to the interactions between the cognitive domain and the affective domain (as they dominate eLearning.) When we analyze the audience with an aim to create learning material for them, we try to create a profile, which has the cognitive as well as the affective parameters. As the affective and cognitive parameters cannot be determined directly; the demographic, pyschographic, and entry behavior data is collected and analyzed to arrive at these.

Let us review how demographics, psychographics, and entry behavior relate the one another.

The demographic data is the preliminary information that outlines the audience profile for us.
It provides us facts such as, age, gender, marital status, country, region, education, profession, income group, and so on. On the basis of demographics, the pyschographic information is determined. The pyschographic information can be understood as the lifestyle, family life, hobbies etc. It isn’t difficult to see that this information is a derivative of the demographic information. For example, the age, gender, education, country, and income group of a person defines his or her life-style and hobbies. Further in this discussion we will also find out how this information influences the content presentation for the audience.

Let us now review the entry behavior of a person, which is probably the most important factor influencing learning. The entry behavior has two important dimensions. The content-related skills that a person possesses at the time of entering a particular training program or a course, and the attitude that the person has towards the content, the training activity, the training provider, or even the learning medium!

The above information, including the demographic, pyschographic, and entry behavior data, should be collected and analyzed before we set out to design instruction. The practice however, differs from theory…and in the case of audience analysis and profiling, the difference between theory and practice is huge! Most instructional designers conscientiously gather information about their audience, tabulate it neatly; then promptly forget all about it. Thus, the time spent on audience analysis goes down the drain, and a course devoid of audience empathy is presented to the learner.

The entry behavior in terms of skills enables the instructional designer to define the pre-requisites for a particular course by filtering the required competencies for what the learner already knows. This is simple enough, and we all know it. Most of us are able to do this bit without any hardships. The other part of entry behavior is the learner’s attitude. The instructional designer can review the audience’s pyschographics to determine what will help the course overcome the learner’s prejudices.

Let me exemplify this through this simple case.

Radhika Reddy, who works with an eLearning organization, has been an instructional designer for the last three years. Now, while she is working 12 hours a day on a prestigious project; she has been asked to attend a three-day workshop on instructional design. Radhika is taken aback. One – she feels that she knows enough instructional design for her work; two – she doesn’t have the time. She knows that the training would be an additional burden on her already packed schedule. Yet, she has not attended a single-day worth of training this year; and with the annual review around the corner she has but a month to complete her mandatory 10 days of training per year. To top it all, her Project Manager has told her that she is falling short on all the Instructional Design quality parameters.

Now think of Radhika’s entry behavior. She feels she already has the skills…she has already formed a negative attitude towards the need for training. She also feels that the training will be a burden, which will tighten her schedule further. Combining the two, she feels that the training is going to be useless.

Radhika’s situation is a very common one. Radhika represents many of our corporate audience. What should we do then, in order to ensure that Radhika’s attitude becomes positive?

The answer is simple to state but difficult to implement. The answer is – Make the training worthwhile for her…all through. Don’t just do it at the beginning, or in the middle, or at the end! Do it through out. Think about it. If Radhika arrives in the training expecting that it will bore her to death, and that she would not derive anything substantial from it; but within the first hour she realizes that the training is extremely interesting, and that she’s already started collecting content-jewels – she will probably consider shedding her attitude!

Here’s where you use the output of the elaborate audience analysis that you did at the beginning of the design and the development process. The entry behavior told you something about the kind of attitude and skills the learner has – the pyschographics will help you design examples, activities, and assignments that will ensure that your audience begins to “respond” (according to Krathwohl’s taxonomy, this is the second level of affective learning.)

Yes, the first step towards a contented audience is the knowledge of the learner’s entry behavior. This knowledge is never available in readymade form; it has to be derived through a rigorous audience analysis. As instructional designers seldom have control over the type of content, and they almost never have the opportunity to select the language to be used; they don’t have the luxury that fiction writers enjoy. On the other hand, they do have an edge over fiction writers; they have a more specific audience, which can help them mold the presentation of the content as well the examples and activities used to guide the learning, to suit their audience better.

Do you see how everything about the audience analysis connects, and how it helps you treat your audience royally? If we give audience the importance they deserve, our courses and trainings will seldom fail. I turned a believer in the power of audience analysis when I saw it working in courses after courses, and trainings after trainings! Take my word for it…It really works!

Author: Shafali R. Anand