Designing online learning activities can feel quite daunting. There’s a wide range of resources, technologies and pedagogies available and it’s often difficult to decide which of them will benefit your learners. The practice of learning design can help online educators to incorporate new ideas in a way that is suited to their learners’ needs.

Learning design has been defined by Mor and Craft (2012) as ‘the act of devising new practices, plans of activity, resources and tools aimed at achieving particular educational aims in a given situation’. Learning design:

• provides a means of guiding the creation of activities that learners will undertake
• prompts educators to think about what they want learners to achieve while studying
• helps educators provide the context that will enable learners to achieve those outcomes
• encourages educators to take into account the diversity of those learners
• provides ways of explaining these activities so that they can be shared with other educators.

The use of personas

Using personas is an effective, non-technological, way of putting people at the centre of your teaching. Personas are used across several fields and have been used in software development and marketing for decades. The use of personas in learning design is more recent.

In education, a persona is a fictional yet realistic description of a potential learner. A persona summarises that learner’s background, geographical location, employment status, educational qualifications, personal characteristics that are relevant to their learning, abilities, experience, preferences, and motivations for study. It also outlines the challenges they face – for example, they may have caring responsiblities which mean they can only study at certain times.

Although fictional, personas can draw on your experience of real learners. Once created, they will have value both in planning new teaching and learning activities and resources, and in checking whether existing resources and learning activities will meet learners’ needs. The real value of personas, though, is during the design stage, before anyone has signed up for your course. Once a course has started you will be able to survey the actual students studying that course and then adapt teaching and learning activities as needed.

A persona is not intended to be a ‘typical’ student, but rather a non-typical student with particular characteristics that might exclude them from learning. While personas don’t cover all possible learner types, they are a prompt for thinking about the many ways in which differences between learners can be accommodated. There are no set rules about how many personas should be created. However, as an indication, we created eight personas for this course, because we knew that it was likely to attract a large and diverse group of learners.

In the next step you’ll be guided through the process of creating a persona.

© The Open University