Identifying the Audience

Overview

Teaching: 60 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• How do we identify the audience of a lesson?

• What are the benefits of doing this early in the development process?

• What are the challenges associated with defining a target audience?

Objectives

• Identify the target audience of their lesson.

• Characterise that target audience in a learner profile or persona.

• Define the prior knowledge required by learners for their lesson.

Reading List

• CDH Chapter 3: Deciding what to teach.

Discussion Prompts

• What did you find challenging about writing learner profiles?
• What are some of the potential benefits of writing specific learner profiles rather than stopping after answering the audience definition questions?
• What are some of the potential downsides?
• Did characterising its target audience change how you plan to approach writing your lesson?
• How many different learner profiles do you think you could write for your lesson?
• What are some of the challenges of writing a lesson aimed at novices?
• What are some of the challenges of writing a lesson aimed at people with some prior knowledge of the topic domain e.g. an intermediate programming lesson?

Homework Tasks

Note for groups of participants collaborating on a single lesson: ALL: a task to be done by all collaborators on a lesson; ONE: a task to be done by only one participant per lesson, ideally after discussion with their collaborators.

• (ALL) Read the Technological Introductions chapter of the CDH and follow the steps to set up your repository as described in the template README file.
• (ONE) Read section A.2 of CDH Appendix A: The Carpentries Incubator, and add topics to your lesson repository. (If you cannot add the complete set of topic tags yet, do not worry: you will be able to add more and remove topics whenever you like.)
• (ALL) Note down any questions you have about the lesson template and, if you got stuck, how far you had progressed with the setup beforehand.
• (ALL) Add a link to your lesson repository to the Study Group’s shared notes document.

Key Points

• Key points will be defined during discussion.