Hi and welcome to this presentation on learner analysis.
A learner analysis is something that should be done at the beginning of designing a course
and it looks at things like "who are your students?", "What previous knowledge and skills
do they have?", "Why are they taking your course?".
And it looks at all these factors and then asks you "how do these things affect your
course design?"
We have a worksheet put together to help you with a learner analysis.
It looks at a variety of characteristics and asks you to come up with the implications
of how these characteristics apply to your learners and how that will affect your course
design.
We are going to look at a few examples of these factors today.
The first one we are going to look at is the percentage of students that take your course
as a required course, or what percentage take it as an elective, what percentage takes it
as a course that fulfills a different requirement, say required six credits in humanities, for
example.
What are the implications of these things for your course design?
A big one could be motivation, interest, prior knowledge.
If students are just taking a class as an elective they may not actually care about
the content at all, they just care about a mark.
That is something that you need to consider and keep in mind when you are planning your
course.
How are you going to design your course that you can engage those students that only care
about a mark?
Another question to consider would be the student's previous experience in the subject
area.
What implication would this have on your course design?
The obvious one would be "where can you start?"
Can you start where you want to start or do you have to start at a very basic level and
work your way up?
Maybe some students have no experience, some have lots.
Is there a way that you can design the course to be able to actually engage both of those
groups of students and everybody in between?
Things you want to consider when designing your course.
Another question to consider would be the percentage of English as an additional language
or English as a second language students.
How would that impact your course design?
One way to could impact your course design is the level of language that you use in the
materials that you provide.
Can you use highly technical, shorthand, things like that?
Or is it going to be very difficult for these students to be able to understand that material?
Can you provide materials in different modalities?
Can you provide that shorthand stuff and then also maybe longer written material and maybe
audio material, video material, graphical material?
Those are things that you want to consider.
Another question to consider is what about the cultural diversity of your students?
How could this impact your course design?
One way it could impact your course design is thinking about the examples you use in
class.
Do those examples mean something to different students from different cultures?
Or are they applicable only to Canadian students?
Do you talk about, for example, hockey a lot in your examples.
If you talk about hockey, you might not be reaching some students.
You want to consider these things.
Another thing to consider with cultural diversity is maybe you have a wide variety of cultures
in your course.
If that is the case, maybe you want to design certain experiences in the class where these
different students actually get the chance to work together.
Maybe you don't want to leave that up to chance, you want to actually design it in such a way
where you will form the groups so that they get those experiences.
If you look at that worksheet, you'll see a long list of things to consider, but where
do you actually get this information?
One place you could get that information might be from obtaining demographic information
from previous offerings of the course.
Maybe you talked to past instructors.
If possible, you could assign a biography assignment, and the biography assignment could
ask them to also talk about why they are in the course, what previous knowledge they have.
That can help you going forward and planning the course.
Obviously, that will be difficult in a large course, so maybe you could do something easier
with some sort of survey tool.
You could do the survey in class, maybe online, maybe you could send that survey out prior
to the first day of class to whatever students are on your course list, just so you have
something to work with.
If you want to get really in depth, you could run a focus group or interviews of the students.
Thank you for watching.
If you want to complete a learner analysis, please feel free to use the chart that I referred
to previously.