This is a brief instruction on how to use student personas to make sure that your courses and teaching are in parallel with your different students.
WHY?
There is very much variety in students, and the distance between the lives of students and us teachers, easily gets bigger year by year. For that it may be a relevant thing to check from time to time, who we are teaching and how we do it.
WHAT & HOW?
Personas is a method that is used in service design for designing better services for the users, people. Basically, in the same way, personas can be used as a tool for designing better fitting teaching and courses for variety of different students. We teachers know many things of our students already after few executed courses, not to even mention the years of teaching, but to create realistic student personas we also probably need fresh student perspective. This short presentation does not focus on different possible ways of that pre-research, but at simplest it can be short questionnaires and little discussions with students during or after lessons based on the results of questionnaires.
When creating personas, it may be a good idea to take the personas a bit to the edges from the average. That way you can get clearer characteristics and needs to fulfill. By creating a few extreme personas from the different sides of the edges you get the average student covered too. As in service design, it may be a good principle in education too, to include some flexibility to the “service” for different personalities, learning styles etc. Again, as in service design, also in education, there are no one and only right ways for doing things, but it always depends of the content, teacher’s personality, students etc. constantly changing elements.
Persona canvas is a good tool for persona creation. There are many different canvases available, and one can also quite easily be created by yourself for your own purposes. Here is one example that is developed for creating student personas. By creating some (three is a good amount to create enough variety) student personas using the canvas, you can you’re your understanding of the students’ possible needs, preferences, wishes, fears and dreams of studying and life. Also, it can include different personal qualities that student has. By making these few personas a bit extreme, you can better test and simulate your different ideas and the flexibility of them. Overall, by creating student personas you can foster student perspective and get guidelines for course design and implementation.
