1.2 Know the students

One of the first principles when developing any teaching or training course, whether for online or face-to-face delivery, is to understand the audience. Understanding who the learners are is always key to delivering a good online learning experience.

Through your experience, you probably know quite a lot about the students who enrol for your courses. For example, for each student, you may know:

• their age, gender, ethnicity, and any disabilities;
• their professional or working backgrounds;
• the life experiences they are likely to have had;
• their motivation for attending the course.

Figure 3 A cohort includes diverse students.

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An illustration showing a grid with six people of different ages, genders and races.

Figure 3 A cohort includes diverse students.

It is important to keep collecting this kind of information so that educators and collaborators/support staff can continue to use it to improve courses and managers can plan for the future.

When moving to online education, teachers, course designers and collaborators/support staff require a range of different information about students. For instance, it is helpful to know:

• how confident and familiar they are with working online;
• which technologies and online tools they are already familiar with (for example, video conferences, webinars, social media);
• how easy it is for them to get internet access and whether access is difficult at certain times;
• which devices they use to get online (for example, phone, tablet or computer);
• whether they need any extra resources to make online material accessible to them (for example, screen readers or writing tools).

In the following video, Charlotte talks about what happened when she moved her training online as a result of COVID-19. She thought carefully about students’ access to technologies and tools. However, when the time came to run the sessions, she realised that some participants were using older models of phones than she had expected, and also that the structure of sessions needed to be planned very differently to work online.

Activity 2 Learning from experience

Timing: Allow about 30 minutes

Watch the video below, or read the transcript, and make a list of changes that could be made by staff at Charlotte’s institution to improve the online training experience for their learners. Note whether the changes would be initiated and made by (a) managers (b) educators and/or (c) collaborators/support staff.

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Transcript

CHARLOTTE:

So, what I’m going to share with you is an experience that we as a programme are going through, as a way to adapt the way that we do capacity development for our volunteers during this COVID era. We were one of the organisations that used to do face-to-face trainings, because we totally believed that children interaction plays a key role in building skills, knowledge and attitudes that are essential in implementing a programme. But, unfortunately, due to COVID, we couldn’t meet, so we had to adapt the way that we interact with our volunteers fast.

One of the things that we ended up settling for, as a programme, is the use of WhatsApp. Why the use of WhatsApp is because we thought every volunteer had a phone, every volunteer could type, and every volunteer could buy, you know, bundles. They are really cheap, and it would enable them to then just give an interaction within the platforms.

But I must say things are not always as we expect them to be. Yes, people had phones. Yes, they had experience in typing, but the experience we later learned during our trainings is that we would, for example, ask our volunteers to use emojis just to show their presence in a workshop. For some, with big phones, it was easy. They would quickly look for a smiley and then press on it. And voila – it comes.

But for some with small phones that need extra buttons they had to work extra hard to get to that image, and sometimes it would take a lot of time than anticipated, meaning by the time they get to see the image and send it, we would be doing question number one, question number two. So that was the biggest problem that we noticed.

The second thing that we noticed is that not everyone was quick in typing and reading. So, in a group WhatsApp platform where you have about 40 participants, everyone is busy typing an answer in response to what the facilitators asked. One wants to read and check whether what they want to write has not already been mentioned. One wants to also learn what others are saying. At the same time, they also want to concentrate with putting their response to the question. By the time they actually press ‘Enter’, what will happen is we are on question number three. So, we realised that pace, typing skills, general knowledge, and appreciation of WhatsApp functions were crucial, and were things that we had taken for granted, mainly because we just thought everyone works with WhatsApp.

How we have managed to work around this problem is that we have introduced another module where we still use WhatsApp platforms, but what we now do is we send information in advance to different groups, so they’re working groups of about five volunteers at a time. They read through the materials. They discuss in their free time before the actual training date.

When they come for the actual training date, what they then do is they are simply giving feedback to what they’ve discussed as a group. The good part about this is that it enables different groups to share experience that they actually do within their school hubs. It enables participants to ask each other questions, comments, clarifications on why they’ve done things in a certain way. And it enables, for example, the facilitator to give the leading role to the participants, because they then determine what is crucial to understand within the training itself, and what new ideas they are then – what they're picking, unlike our old model, where everything used to be sent out to the group, then the facilitator, then they would get to summarise it for everyone for them to be on the same level.

End transcript

 

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You may have come up with a number of possible changes. Here are some examples:

• Consider learners’ access to technology before planning the training. Depending on the structure of an organisation, this change could be initiated by an educator/trainer or collaborator/support staff (administrator, support tutor etc.).
• Choose an appropriate tool or application for running the training. This change can be initiated by the trainer/educator; however, it will require IT and technical staff support to choose the most appropriate and secure tool/app and managers’ support to pay for the licence or other fees (if needed).
• Consider activity types and delivery arrangements. These can be initiated by the educator or trainer when planning a session.

Reflecting on this new knowledge about the students meant the course could be redesigned so that it worked much better.

One way of thinking about different types of learner and how to design an online course to meet their diverse needs is by creating profiles that identify a range of key characteristics. This kind of activity is often referred to as ‘generating personas’, meaning creating descriptions of the sorts of learner you expect to be teaching or supporting. To do this, you can use persona forms such as this one [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , used by The Open University.

Ensuring an online course is accessible to students with disabilities and those with additional needs is particularly important. In fact, online education has the potential to be much more accessible than face-to-face learning. This is partly because participants do not need to travel, and partly because – with asynchronous training – they can study at their own pace and at a time that suits them.

You will find out more about making online education accessible for students with disabilities in Week 7.

Figure 3 Personas help to identify how learners differ and to design course that meet their needs.

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Two cartoon images side by side. The first one says ‘Good learning design’ at the bottom and has an image of a person working on a laptop. The speech coming from their mouth reads ‘This learning was designed for me!’. The second image says ‘Bad learning design’ at the bottom and has an image of a person with their head on the table and the laptop on top of their head.

Figure 3 Personas help to identify how learners differ and to design course that meet their needs.