Versioning Learning to Different Target Learner Groups

Introduction

This chapter will explore the following questions:

• •

  How can target learning groups be identified and differentiated along particular dimensions?

• •

  What are their respective learning needs? What are their expectations for learning conventions?

• •

  After baseline learning is designed (and / or developed), what are the different types of versioning of that content to different target learner groups with different learning needs?

• •

  How can the core learning be preserved? How can negative learning be controlled for?

• •

  What design approaches enable the efficient and effective versioning of the respective learning for the particular groups?

• •

  What sort of pilot testing may be done to ensure the efficacy of the teaching and learning for the particular target learning groups?

Figure 1.

A Word Cloud of Chapter 7­

One way to extend instructional design work is to achieve the design and the development and then to add value to the designed learning contents by versioning the designed learning for additional usages with other learning groups, in different contexts, and on different platforms. In other words, the created learning may be retrofitted or revised or updated or iterated to enable usage by additional target learner groups, based on a range of different strategies. (Figure 2)

Figure 2.

Topic Sequence in Visual Approaches to Instructional Design, Development, and Deployment

This work will address the following questions:

• •

  How can target learning groups be identified and differentiated along particular dimensions?

• •

  What are their respective learning needs? What are their expectations for learning conventions?

• •

  After baseline learning is designed (and / or developed), what are the different types of versioning of that content to different target learner groups with different learning needs?

• •

  How can the core learning be preserved? How can negative learning be controlled for?

• •

  What design approaches enable the efficient and effective versioning of the respective learning for the particular groups?

• •

  What sort of pilot testing may be done to ensure the efficacy of the teaching and learning for the particular target learning groups?

Review Of The Literature

The design of learning to learner needs depends in part on better understanding who the target learners are and their needs (learner profiling). Demographics are one traditional way to “thin slice” a learner population. Another is by culture and language, and other intersectionalities. Another common one is by age. Other ways of segmenting a learner group include learner values, human drives and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, various types of learner resistances, learner identities, learning contexts (socio-technologically), and other aspects (Hai-Jew, 2020). There are ways to slice a population by stand-alone dimensions as well as combinations of various dimensions. Practically speaking, the learner groups are addressed in fairly large swaths because of the costs of addressing smaller segments of a population. The idea is to understand the personhood of learner groups in a summary sense, similar to the uses of “personas” in marketing.