Audience Analysis
What a trip to two villages, Dausa and Lawan in Rajasthan, taught me!!
ADDIE - where, A stands for Analysis. Audience Analysis, the most important of all. We all learned that; but somewhere along the way we forgot its purpose. It got reduced to an item in the checklist – to be ticked off after administering a templatized questionnaire using standard questions, which claim to help us learn about our audience. However, once in a while, comes a project, in which the template doesn’t work – because you cannot administer it over email. You have to get there – on the ground in order to fill up the questionnaire, which you so confidently carry with you!!
And then comes the mother of all surprises – the questionnaire, which has always worked well is not helping in this situation. So, you chuck the questionnaire, and get down to listening to the target audience, and observing them. The day flies by and you realize this is what audience anlaysis means – and you are now armed with – no not information – rather, empathy for the audience.
And herein lies a huge lesson for me and every learning designer. We may have knowledge of the written word, but they possess the wisdom of experience. So let’s not treat them as blank slates to be filled by the gyan that we have to offer. Let’s listen carefully, and observe minutely at what the audience is sharing - once we get back and decode these, well, almost magically, we will have a learning strategy that will work!