Are Learner Personas a useful design tool?
When people talk notionally about great learning experiences, the term student-centred is often in there somewhere. What student-centred actually means though depends on who you’re speaking to.
For some it’s related to the level of freedom students are given, for others it might be that you’ve attempted to put yourself into the shoes of students. Either way it’s one of the most fashionable terms in the lexicon of learning and teaching.
As a term and idea, it’s comparable to User-Centered Design which is synonymous with User Experience Design (UX). In that sense, it’s perhaps not surprising that learning designers might look to draw upon the practices of UX as the result of a desire to be student-centred.
One particular practice from UX that now seems to be becoming more widely adopted in learning design is the creation of Personas. But do they add value to the learning design process?
Personas certainly have the potential to be useful, but if we don’t think carefully about their relevance and usefulness to the domain of learning design and don’t fully understand what they’re there to do - there’s a danger of them becoming a hollow transposition, or a kind of vanity addition.
If we’re going to consider using Personas in learning design then there are some pitfalls and principles to be aware of before making an informed decision on whether they are used.
Personas should be based on research
One of the first things to understand is the purpose of Personas - as it’s something that people frequently get wrong.
Personas are a container for actual research on real people that’s presented in a way that’s easy to digest, understand, inform and remember. If they’re not built on the foundation of solid and significant research then their value is hugely diluted and becomes questionable.
This is probably the most significant thing to think about when considering using Personas in learning design. Not least because I think it’s fair to say that research on learners or any kind of deep analysis prior to design is one of the most fundamental deficiencies of most education and training providers.
In that sense there’s a huge opportunity and risk in using Personas. The opportunity is that you begin to change the culture and ways of working such that this aspect of learning design is taken much more seriously. Whilst on the other hand, the risk is that your Personas simply become vacuous containers of bias that do nothing to improve learning design.
Ultimately, you should ask yourself whether there is the time and scope to conduct robust research on learners and/or whether solid evidence exists to support their creation and validates their use.
If not, then using Personas might simply have to remain an aspiration on a journey towards greater time and energy spent on research and analysis in the learning design process.
Personas should relate to what is being designed
The second significant characteristic of Personas is that they should contain information that actually influences what is being designed.
This sounds so glaringly obvious when written down but it’s a common misstep. I’ve seen Personas and Persona templates used in learning design that look more like a means of getting a date than designing learning experiences.
So if you’re considering using them, some careful thought on what categories of information would be most useful to have research on and be reflected in Personas is absolutely critical.
People will have different views on this, which is reflective of the different pedagogical philosophies that people subscribe to, but I would contend that irrespective of that there are some things of central importance.
The first of which being prior knowledge or understanding, because in the words of the notable educational psychologist David Ausubel:
“The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly”
If Learner Personas aren’t in some way informed by research on the level and dimensions of prior knowledge then they are not likely to have as significant an impact on learning design as they ought to.
The second area is motivation, which is a big and complicated topic but undoubtedly important when it comes to learning. If you have or can conduct research that highlights what patterns there might be in terms of types of value (e.g. attainment, instrumental, intrinsic) and expectancies (their expectations and attributing factors), then you will have something significant that has the potential to influence the design of learning experiences.
Learner design maturity: Moving towards a research-driven approach
These are just two important areas and there are obviously others. If Personas are going to be useful to learning design they’ll need to be properly situated in the context of learning experience design rather than being slightly modified templates from other domains.
I suspect they will become used more in learning design, but whether they become more than slightly superficial icebreakers to the process will depend not on the container itself but an orientation and culture shift that places emphasis and importance on learner research and analysis.
This is a sign of real maturity when it comes to learning design irrespective of what form that research ultimately takes. To date though, for many education providers, the cost of that work has outweighed the opportunity.
