Spin the Persona Big Wheel! Do you know who your students are? Did you design your course with them in mind? Let’s take a look at empathetic course design, creating student personas, and strategies for designing with empathy, compassion, and reflection.
Students come to our courses with a variety of unseen barriers. These barriers may take the form of work, family, medical, or cultural reasons, all of which may affect the time the student is able to put into the course. Designing with empathy in mind can help account for those barriers and result in greater student success. When we design with empathy, we put ourselves in the shoes of our students and seek to understand their lived experiences in order to better communicate with them and show acceptance.
In this session we will work together to create personas that summarize a particular subset of the student population. Participants will spin the Big Wheel of Student Archetypes to plug in behaviors, assumptions, and expectations that students have to create a student persona that can better inform the work of faculty and instructional designers. Participants are encouraged to engage with the presenters and each other to discuss the archetypes and develop a reliable and accurate representation of a targeted student population. We will then use this collective persona to discuss ways to build in activities to get to know your students in order to design with empathy in mind. We will examine how to identify the obstacles and challenges students face and put an emphasis on reflection.
After working together to create a shared persona, we will use that persona to examine how to use it to tailor the course design to meet the needs of that particular student archetype. Participants will then have the opportunity to work (in small groups or breakout rooms) with a template and start creating and sharing their own personas that reflect the student population which their institution serves. Attendees may choose to use the Wheels of Student Archetypes to create their persona or draw from their individual institution’s known population.
Attendees will walk away being able to:
- Describe what a persona, empathy, and sympathy are.
- Create a persona.
- Select design strategies to be included in course design based upon their student persona.
Game elements planned based on The Price is Right will help to create student personas, select design elements, and hand out (if in person) prizes.