Ad-hoc learner personas

In her discussion of ‘learner personas’, Huprich (2019) defines personas as:

a fictional character built that models actual users. It’s not a real person; however, it’s built on common characteristics that your learners share. Personas are built to represent large portions of your user base — in this case, your learners. Who are they? What do they like? What motivates them? What frustrates them? Do they use technology? What are their learning goals? Why are they using your system? Personas can answer all of these questions and more, helping you to make decisions about what kind of training to build, what content to cover, and what format to use.

Using this and what you have learned from Nick and Carina’s contributions:

• devise an ad hoc student persona for a blended or hybrid course of your choice and explain briefly the implications for your design.

Post your persona to comments below. You might also like to draw on the below example that I put together as part of the transition of my own teaching to emergency online provision during the Covid 19 pandemic. The module concerned is an undergraduate Spanish economic history module that is taught in Spanish at the University of Nottingham.

Student persona exemplar

Ana is 21. She lives with 3 other students in a part of the city that has a high student population density. Ana is from a bilingual Spanish/English background. She is a confident user of technology, but has little experience of the type of hybrid delivery using technologies such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom that form the cornerstone of the University’s teaching response to the pandemic. Ana’s working conditions are conducive to remote study. Her housemates are also final year undergraduate students and so understand her need for quiet study. She is self-motivated and very conscientious but can lack self-confidence. One of her concerns is that she has little prior conceptual knowledge to draw upon. Hitherto, she has chosen options that look at Spanish film and literature and not the aspects of social and economic history that this module explores.