Bring your learners to life through personas

Transforming teaching into a short online course can feel like a daunting task, with countless questions buzzing about in the early stages: how do you engage with learners in a primarily asynchronous space? How do you overcome transactional distance? How much teacher presence is enough? All of these are important questions and their answers can make the course design process easier, but one of the most important questions to address first is: who are your learners?

Using personas is an efficient way to identify your learners and therefore help you structure your course to meet their needs. A persona is a representation of a fictional person or group, based on user research. Personas help you identify typical learners who might be interested in your course or content. It’s important to create personas that are realistic and not caricatures or stereotypes. 

Personas should always be based on first-hand observation and real people. You can conduct interviews or focus groups with learners to understand their wants and needs in relation to your proposed course idea. You can also capture insights into current courses by reviewing learning analytics data and conducting post-course surveys. This is especially useful if your proposed course is building on a larger programme or suite of courses. All this real-world data should feed into the personas you create.

• Eyes on the horizon: Innovations in providing higher education
• How we can use AI to power career-driven lifelong learning
• THE podcast: the big ideas behind microcredentials

Why use personas? 

Personas help us to step back from our content and our own biases. They allow us to see things from the perspective of our intended users and understand their unique needs and expectations. By doing this, we gain insights into what our learners truly need and how we can meet their expectations. 

Using personas might even challenge us to think about concepts we have never considered before, which can lead to increased engagement with our courses. Personas can be used in the development of online, face-to-face and blended courses and programmes at all levels, whether further or higher education, or lifelong learning. 

Target audience 

When commencing work on your online course, first think about the type of learner who might be interested in this mode of learning based on your first-hand learner findings. This will give you an idea of the range of learners who could take your course, known as your target audience. When creating a persona, it is important to keep this target audience in mind.

To ensure that a persona is realistic and useful for informing your course design, you should consider a range of key aspects, such as motivation and expectations for the course, background, experience, digital skillset, age, education and so on. Learning analytics data is captured in the background of many virtual learning environments, such as FutureLearn, Coursera or edX, which can serve as a good starting base. If you were designing a course aimed at continuing professional development (CPD), for instance, then you might identify your learner as someone with at least an undergraduate qualification, with 10 years’ professional experience, who is now looking to upskill in their field and work towards a promotion – this demographic information can then shape what the course looks like and what it needs to achieve for this learner. 

There are numerous ways to create personas but, as a starting point, we recommend looking at these tried-and-tested learner archetypes from FutureLearn and the online learning personas created for marketing the University of Edinburgh’s online Masters portfolio in 2017 to give you an idea of what they look like in practice. 

You might also find this personas guidance useful when thinking about your own target audience. It outlines how best to create a persona, as well as how to conduct research on who your users will be and why they would want to study your course. 

How to get started? 

Think about various aspects of your persona’s career or study situations and why they would be looking for your course. Breaking your persona down into background, key traits and motivations for studying online is a helpful exercise.

Consider these key questions to help you identify a target audience: 

• Who will your learners be? Why have you chosen this audience? 
• What are the learners’ expectations for the course? 
• What is their motivation for taking the course? 
• What is their background/experience? 
• What are their demographic characteristics (age, gender, education, occupation)? 
• What is their digital skillset? How comfortable will they be in the online environment? 
• Where are your learners located? 
• What disabilities may your learners have? Visual, hearing, cognitive, motor impairments? How will you ensure they don’t face barriers in their learning? 

After you address these questions, write two or three sentences outlining some of the key aspects of your target audience and why you think they would be drawn towards taking your course. You can then use this as a reference during your course design. 

Benefit of personas 

Creating a list of personas will give you the opportunity to review and reflect on your ideas. It will also enable you to evaluate and improve on aspects that you might not have considered before, such as accessibility, diversity and inclusion. Using personas provides a fresh perspective for considering learner motivations, backgrounds, skills and interests.

Most importantly, it will inform the content development process to ensure your learners get the best out of your course.

Andrés Ordorica is an instructional designer at the University of Edinburgh.

If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.

View the full “How to Create an Online Course”, available on FutureLearn.