Lights, Camera, Audience!

I know that's not quite the saying, but today's post is all about putting the focus on the audience. When designing any course or training, an understanding of one's audience is a huge determinant in whether or not your program will be effective and successful. This can be particularly true for adult learners, who tend to have much broader experiences and interests that can be built on and captured if your course is designed with them in mind (Pappas, 2014). 

For this post, I want to share something I created about a year ago in an attempt to understand my audience. I worked for an environmental non-profit, and we would take people on hikes to highlight work the organization was engaged in. Sometimes these hikes were quite long and challenging (we even planned some backpacking trips!), and we occasionally found our attendees ill prepared for the event. So, I decided to create a simple google form to help understand if the audience would be receptive to the experience. 

Why a google form, I hear you say? Because I love them. Because they have nearly unlimited functionality. Because they are easy! You can pick from a variety of templates, but they can be customized in dozens of useful ways.

Below is the original form I created. I included mostly need-to-know information in pretty simple terms.

This form didn't take into account many particulars of my specific audience. As a non-profit, our audience partly consisted of retirees, donors, or environmental enthusiasts with extra time (and money!). It also included a fair number of volunteers, college students, local professionals in environmental fields, and others who were compelled by the mission of the organization.

Overall, our audience could be summed up by one word: treehuggers!

The form worked well for my initial intent; I was able to plan hikes of appropriate length and difficulty, and gain some essential information to help me prepare logistics. But, I wasn't getting a lot of information about how to really connect with my audience, which was the actual purpose of the event. Increasing intrinsic motivation for an audience is correlated with higher enjoyment and engagement (Andriotis, 2017), so I need to understand how to best activate their intrinsic motivation.

Understanding the cultural context of a group is important to designing a learning experience (Baaki & Stefaniak, 2013), but thankfully, I am well-versed in the Asheville hippie ways of the world. However there are other things it's important to ascertain that are more individual. Adult audiences, particularly in educational settings, differ from children in several key ways: they are more self-directed in their interests, want information to be relevant to their lives and interests, and want to apply the knowledge they gain immediately (Pappas, 2014). In order to appeal to these traits, I need to know what their interests are!

Below is the remodeled survey. I added some questions to try to prepare not only for the logistics of an event, but making sure participants could get the most out of the experience. While my job was to promote and show off the organization's work, I also had plenty of hiking miles that I could use to provide other information of interest, and hopefully get folks even more engaged in the work. So, I added in a few longer form, open ended questions to try to get at some of these motivators particular to adult learners. A mix of open and closed questions is recommended for these profile questionnaires anyways (Andriotis, 2017), so adding these helped me balance my question styles.

While I may never know the impact of these three little questions, I'd like to think I'd be pleasantly surprised by how much you can learn if you just ask. While it's no secret that people hate internet forms, it's also no secret that they love to talk about themselves. Hopefully, the latter impulse will outweigh the former, and make the most of my time with tree huggers!

References

Andriotis, N. (2017). Know Your Audience! EFront. https://www.efrontlearning.com/blog/2016/10/guide-learners-needs-analysis.html

Pappas, C. (2014, September 25). 5 Ways to Effectively Assess your Elearning Course Audience. ELearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/5-ways-effectively-assess-elearning-course-audience

Stefaniak, J., & Baaki, J. (2013). A Layered Approach to Understanding your Audience. 52(6). https://canvas.lr.edu/courses/15386/files/1336389/download?wrap=1