Learner and Setting Characteristics Take a real world instructional design situation and, thinking about your potential audience, outline possible learner characteristics along with a description of...

Learner and Setting Characteristics                                2
LEARNER AND SETTING CHARACTERISTICS
Overview of an Instructional Design Situation
    The instructional design situation in this case is taken to be a school classroom, which applies a rotation mode of blended learning. According to Earp (2017), classroom setting and design has a great impact on the academic outcome and learner education. Classroom setting has an impact of as much as 16% on the learning abilities of the students. According to the observations of Rands and Gansemer-Topf (2017), classroom design and its execution can affect up to 25% of a class’s learning progress, either positively or negatively. The potential audience, therefore are the students of the particular class. The learners are school students belonging to age group of 14-15 years. Since it is an all-girls school, the students of the selected class are female students of the above-mentioned age group. As young school students are the target audience in this case, the pointers of skill and education levels, as well as prior experience does not count.
Intended Instructional Setting
The design of instruction in this classroom is based on the rotation model of blended learning. In this method of learning, the students are provided with both offline on-campus classes as well as online lessons. The scheduling of the online and offline classes is usually planned by the class instructor or teacher, one month ahead of execution. During the online classes the mode of instruction is usually verbal. However, at times special notes are uploaded on the school portal for the students. In case of any problems during the study of a particular topic, few special doubt-clearing sessions are conducted after the completion of the topic or topics. Often online surprise tests are conducted to check the learning and reading done by the students. This also helps the instructors to assess the students and alter their teaching methods accordingly, if the need arises.
During the offline classes, the mode of instruction is usually in a mixed form. When teaching a particular topic, for instance, the mode is that of teacher-directed instruction. After the completion of a topic, the mode changes to teacher-directed small group instruction or student-directed small group or even individual work. The switching of the modes depends on the requirement of the students. In the offline mode of classroom setting, during doubt clearing sessions, teachers and instructors conduct debates and group discussions to provide clarity regarding the discussed topic. After the direct classes, certain topics require extra clarity for adequate understanding. In such cases, computer-oriented learning is also encouraged in the classroom. During on-campus classes, the students are sometimes asked to present topics of their interest through creative and technical interventions, such as charts, posters, PowerPoint presentations and so on. As a result of this, the...