Understanding your learners’ characteristics

Understanding who your learners are is always key to delivering good training. Through your existing monitoring and evaluation activities you probably already know quite a lot about the people who usually attend your face-to-face training sessions.

For example, you may know:

  • their ages, genders, ethnicities, and any disabilities
  • their professional or working backgrounds, or the life experiences they are likely to have had
  • why they attend your training sessions and how they usually respond to the different components.

  

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A grid showing six people of different ages, genders and races.

It is important to keep collecting this kind of information in online training so that you can continue to use it to improve your courses, and also so that you can discover any differences between who attends your online training and your face-to-face sessions.

It is fairly straightforward to move your existing monitoring and evaluation activities online, using a free survey or quiz tool such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. Building in time in a synchronous session to fill in the forms usually works better than leaving people to fill in forms afterwards.

Introduction

Online learning needs