So, what exactly is a learner profile, and how similar is it to a buyer persona or audience archetype?
In the world of professional instructional design, there’s no questioning the need to understand your learner when designing training and other educational content.
Spending time thinking through what a particular audience needs and how they will react as they proceed through a course provides an invaluable framework for the training structure and particular elements that make the benefits of knowledge more tangible and attainable.
With a specific profile in mind, you can craft educational content that is more engaging and discover new ways for learners to obtain true knowledge. In other words, there is no one way to teach a certain topic — it will always vary based on the intended audience.
As you know, this is also essential when crafting marketing messages and content. The only way to create content that resonates and engages with a particular audience other than intimately understanding them is dumb luck, and luck is not a strategy.
Is a Learner Profile the Same as a Buyer Persona?
So, what exactly is a learner profile, and how similar is it to a buyer persona or audience archetype? Indeed, it is very similar, with the key difference being context.
In marketing, a buyer persona is a detailed portrait of your ideal customer. It tells their story, revealing their motivations, wants, and needs. This type of profile is crucial for crafting the right messaging and developing products that resonate with your target audience.
An audience archetype in the context of digital content marketing and audience attraction comes into play earlier in the customer journey. It focuses on understanding the informational needs and desires of potential customers before they’re ready to make a purchase.
When shifting to paid education products, a learner profile describes how a particular student will best absorb the subject matter. It’s a tool that helps educators understand and cater to different learning styles and preferences. \
This naturally leads us to a fundamental question: How do people learn? Understanding this is key to creating effective learner profiles and, ultimately, to designing impactful educational experiences.
The Evolution of Learning Theory
The history of learning spans millennia, with theories evolving alongside scientific understanding. While a comprehensive historical overview isn’t essential to grasp current best practices, a brief journey through time reveals how our understanding of learning has developed.
Ancient Greek philosophers laid the foundation for early learning theories. Epicurus and his contemporaries believed sensory impressions were directly copied and stored in the brain. Plato challenged this view, arguing that we lack direct comprehension of the world and must rely on observation and reasoning to discern truth.
The Middle Ages saw a shift as the influence of the Catholic Church grew. St. Thomas Aquinas integrated Greek thought with the belief that true wisdom and illumination came directly from God. This perspective held sway until the Renaissance, which witnessed a return to Platonic ideas emphasizing human reasoning as the key to distinguishing truth from falsehood.
As the study of learning transitioned from philosophy to psychology, two main schools of thought emerged:
Positivism: This approach asserts that learning occurs through pure logic and empirical experience, based on the belief in an objective reality that can be observed and understood.
Interpretivism: This perspective argues that knowledge is subjective and created rather than discovered as individuals process information through their unique lenses.
These philosophical branches significantly influenced learning psychology. Notable developments included:
Behaviorism: Championed by B.F. Skinner, this theory focused on observable behaviors, exemplified by experiments like Pavlov’s dogs and operant conditioning in rats.
Cognitive Psychology: This approach shifted focus to mental processes, emphasizing the importance of understanding what happens in the mind for effective learning and teaching.
As you encounter these historical perspectives, you may recognize elements of past methodologies you’ve encountered in your own educational experiences. Understanding this evolution provides context for our current approaches to learning and teaching.
Modern Learning Theory: Constructivism
As we transition from historical approaches to contemporary educational thinking, we arrive at constructivism — a principle that has revolutionized how we understand learning. At its core, constructivism holds that learners actively build new knowledge by connecting it to their existing understanding and experiences.
What does this mean for effective teaching?
Relevance and Realism: Lessons must resonate with learners’ real-world experiences to be truly impactful.
Multiple Perspectives and Modalities: People learn differently, so it’s crucial to present information in various formats — text, video, and audio. This approach not only caters to different learning styles but also reinforces understanding for all learners.
Diverse Explanations: Explain concepts in multiple ways to ensure you reach a broader audience and strengthen comprehension for those who grasped it initially.
Learner Ownership: Encourage students to take responsibility for their learning journey. This involves creating interactive, engaging content that motivates learners to progress independently.
Meta-Learning: Discuss not just the “what” and “how” but also the “why” behind concepts. This self-awareness of the knowledge construction process deepens understanding and retention.
Remember the example of teaching long division to a 10-year-old? This scenario perfectly illustrates constructivism in action. There are various approaches, all rooted in constructivist principles. They transform an abstract mathematical algorithm into something tangible and relatable.
The most effective method I found framed long division in terms of sharing money among children — a concept easily understood by young learners. This approach demonstrates how new information (long division) can be built upon existing knowledge (sharing items fairly), making the learning process more intuitive and memorable.
It’s fascinating to realize that while this approach seems like common sense, it’s a relatively recent development in educational theory, emerging only in the last few decades. Constructivism has reshaped our understanding of effective teaching, emphasizing the importance of connecting new information to learners’ existing knowledge and experiences.
What does this mean in a nutshell? Effective education is relatable, and you, as a mentor, teacher, and marketer, must understand your student and/or prospect to make the appropriate connection with them.
In other words, effective education is relatable in a way that connects someone’s existing knowledge with new knowledge, allowing them to have that “aha” moment that also makes you relatable as an instructor.
Empathy (Mapping) is Key
The goal of a good learner profile is to understand how the student sees the world, both in general and in the context of the problem your education solves. As with marketing, beginning with your worldview allows you to authentically engage your students with familiar teaching tools like stories and analogies.
The Empowerment Marketing Toolkit provides a quicker route to an impactful learner profile for teaching older students. The Worldview Profiles are research-backed and represent the eight predominant viewpoints, while the Positive Aging Profiles give you handy ways of quickly understanding the different psychological approaches to healthy aging. The remainder of the Toolkit matches your values and expertise with their learning needs.
If you want to do it all yourself, there’s the tried-and-true approach of empathy mapping. While you’re still starting with your own perspectives, it’s important to remember that you are not your audience, even though you share the same values and general attitudes.
You’re a subject matter expert at what you do, for starters, and they are not. Being a “leading” expert means constantly reminding yourself that you’re ahead of your tribe in knowledge and experience, and it’s your job to bring them along with you with your training content.
This means ensuring you don’t fall victim to the curse of knowledge. This cognitive bias occurs when an expert unknowingly assumes that others understand certain things they take for granted.
This one assumption alone can sink your thought course creation efforts. Plus, you don’t want to assume that your students share other characteristics that you have — you want to know, as well as you can, what they’re thinking, feeling, seeing, and doing.
In other words, to have the empathy to walk the learning journey in their shoes, you must first see things from their perspective. Then, you can create the content that “mentors” them along the journey.
Let’s take a closer look at empathy, the definition of which consists of two parts:
The intellectual identification with the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
The vicarious experiencing of those feelings, thoughts, or attitudes.
As you know, you want to enter the conversation already playing in your student’s head in the context of the problem they’re trying to solve with education. By aligning with their values, attitudes, and worldviews (the bundle of beliefs), you’re actually aiming for the prospect’s precognitive heart, and that’s how your training triggers the right motivators and insights at the right time.
Empathy maps vary in shape and size, but there are basic elements common to each one:
Four quadrants broken into “Thinking,” “Seeing,” “Doing,” and “Feeling”
Two optional boxes at the bottom of the quadrants: “Pains” and “Gains”
To get started, you can download and print a large version of an empathy map here.
The map allows you to easily organize your research and other relevant materials. The four quadrants represent the sensory experience of your ideal customer while in the prospecting phase.
Ask yourself questions such as:
What does a typical day look like in their world?
What are their fears and hopes?
How do they feel about the problem your education solves?
What are they thinking when they resist solving the problem?
What do they hear when other people solve the problem?
Who do they see as viable options to solve the problem?
What do they see in the world in the context of the problem?
What do they say or feel when encountering your advice?
What are their potential pain points when following your advice?
Is your educational content a positive or a painful experience for them?
Will they hear positive feedback about you from external sources?
What do they hope to gain from training with you?
Jot down needs and insights that emerge as you work through this exercise. Then, simply paste those notes in the proper boxes on the large empathy map.
You can also draw two boxes at the bottom of your empathy map: “Pains” and “Gains.”
In the “Pains box,” describe your archetype’s challenges and obstacles. Ask yourself, “What keeps my people up at night?”
In the “Gains” box, include the goals your ideal audience member hopes to accomplish. Ask, “What motivates my people to solve their problem?” and “What are their hopes and dreams?”
Next up … the benefits of knowledge
The key aspect of understanding your audience of learners is knowing not just what the problem is but also what success looks like. This is what I call the benefits of knowledge.
And while these benefits should be a part of the learner profile you create, they are too important to get wrong. So, we’ll explore this aspect of understanding your ideal learner in detail in the next lesson.