Analyzing Your Learners and Context

Analyzing the learners and the context of learning is important for many reasons. Although nearly everyone knows of the basic advice that one should "know the audience" when giving a speech or teaching a lesson, the ISD process stresses a systematic look at what characteristics of the audience are most relevant.

What do you look at? Almost any characteristic of either the learners or the setting that could affect how you teach and how your learners learn might be part of your analysis here. This includes such learner characteristics as prior knowledge and skills, attitudes, and so on. It also might include characteristics of the environment like group pressures or the physical layout of rooms. You need to decide what will be important for your project.

When you are doing your learner analysis, there are two key questions. First, which characteristics of your learners are relevant. Second, what do we do with that information?