Know Your Audience

Whenever you are creating a course or learning environment, it is critical to know your audience. First it is important to know what you want to you audience to accomplish.  As an experience college educator, you already know that if you were to create an introductory college course you would naturally want a course that enables students to:

• articulate general principles of the course topic,
• have a general idea of the field
• consider the subject from a variety of perspectives and
• apply an approach to problem solving employed by professionals in that discipline.

Alternatively, advanced level college courses involve higher levels of abstraction, a more sophisticated understanding of the content, and extensive knowledge of the field.  Consequently, knowing what level of knowledge the expected student has and the level of the course expectations gives you great insight as to what your course will need to be successful. 

Knowing your audience also entails understanding the specific needs of our students.  This will allow for courses to target resources to meet students where they need most help.  For example, if you create an online course and presume that the students all younger and younger people are digital natives who should not have a problem navigating the LMS, you may be in for a shock when you discover that 1 in 4 students in your class are over the age of 25.  Further, often low income and first generation students do not have the same level of computer competence as their fellow students. This can greatly affect your courses’ design effectiveness. It is best to know who your audience is and design it inclusively for the various students who will be attending the class.  While you may want to make it easy for those who are familiar with computers, you may want to remember you also want to accommodate those who are not.

Overcoming your perception of students and looking at the reality of your college is critical for understanding how to best meet your student’s needs.  For example, while most people think the average college student is 20 years old, the average college student is actually 26 years old.  Further, while more students enrolled in four year colleges (58%) than two year programs (42%), and half of these students attend full time, community colleges have generally have a higher level of part-time students than full-time students.  Hispanic students are also over-represented in public two-year colleges while less likely to attend a four year college and get a bachelor’s degree.  

Over all, knowing your courses audience is critical for them achieving success.  As an instructor or course designer, you don’t want to tacitly accept your intuition about your students.  The more you learn about them, the better you can accommodate their needs and increase their success. Ultimately, this contributes to higher retention, high graduation rates, and more satisfied students and administrators.  Of course, the better teaching reviews that are correlated to better course design doesn’t hurt either.