Knowing Your Audience (2:10)

Rudd: For this particular course I knew the audience would be adults. And tapping into what I know about androgogy and teaching adults, I know that adults have shorter attention spans, so we tried to prepare the video segments in 15-minute chunks or less.  I also know adults are very business-like in how they approach an educational setting, so trying to give them the information they need, try to be very upfront and clear about what is needed. So knowing who your audience is does help out in course design.

Hightower: In our first discussion with a professor, we want to know if it's going to be a freshmen audience for a very basic course or if it's going to be a continuing education course for older students. And it really helps us to know who the students are going to be in the course to tune our technology to go with them. If they're younger students, they can usually deal with a lot of online materials or Flash animations, or bulletin boards in their course. If they are an older population, they may not be as comfortable with the technology, so we try to scale that back a little bit.     

Irani: In the course that I taught, it was apparent to me at the beginning that the students were not very computer literate, and yet I was using a lot of interactive technologies, and I was combining videoconferencing and Web-based methods. So I was able to tailor the course, as it went on, to make things easier for students. We had some situations where students were taking the online part of the course from their offices, so we had to work around firewalls a couple of times. And some students were working on different computers -- maybe at work and maybe at home -- and had to manage plug-ins, and things like that. Knowing what the students' backgrounds were and their level of working with technology, we adjusted along the way. And having that knowledge of the audience was helpful to me as we went through the course.