Abstract
This paper reports on work conducted by the Computer Science Usability Group at the University of Hertfordshire in which a User-Centred Design methodology was applied to gain a deeper understanding of our undergraduate distance learning student population. Specifically, the work reported here is concerned with the approach employed to the development of personas, and how these were applied to the design of learning experiences. This paper also includes samples of the personas produced as part of this work. Discussions with staff elicited a mixed response to the approach; some colleagues felt they already had a good intuitive sense of who the learners were. However it is argued here that one of the benefits of using personas is in how they make such implicit knowledge explicit and the impact this has upon the collective understanding of who our learners are.
1. Introduction
Despite the amount of data that we collect about our students (for instance, gender and age), it does not provide an adequate sense of the people behind the numbers. In addition, it does not provide a strong sense of the context in which they are studying. This is particularly limiting in flexible and distance learning contexts, when face to face contact may be reduced. Nonetheless, this data provides invaluable information that, when applied in user profiling techniques would support the development of personas that would aid our understanding of key aspects of the study life of our students. This paper is concerned with work conducted by the Computer Science Usability Group at the University of Hertfordshire in which a User-Centred Design methodology was applied to better understand our distance learning student population. The methodology employed in this work involved the development of personas.
Personas are user archetypes that characterise the needs, goals, technical experience, accessibility requirements and other personal characteristics of larger groups of people (CitationCooper, 1999; Rogers et al., 2011; Saffer, 2009). The creation of rich, inspiring student profiles, or personas, can provide colleagues with an enhanced view of our student population, and this was the main motivation for the work reported here.
Although the use of personas is applicable to flexible learning in general, including different modalities of study (for example, campus-based students), the work here focuses on distance learning students. The paper will present the description and discussion of personas developed for our online distance learning programme in Computer Science, as well as practical examples of how these were applied to the pedagogical and technical design of learning experiences as mediated by a framework for flexible learning also devised by the authors (CitationPyper et al., 2007; Pyper et al., 2011).
2. Personas
CitationCooper (1999) describes personas as a powerful design tool and adds that “the greater power of personas is their precision and specificity” (p. 130). A typical persona would consist of a name, picture, job description, goals, a representative quote and personal details such as what they do in their leisure time (CitationCooper, 1999; Rogers et al., 2011; Saffer, 2009). An example of this can be found in .
The idea behind these details is to create an archetype of a learner group that is engaging to those using it in design and development work. It provides a richer account of learners and makes it much easier for designers and developers to keep the learners in mind when they are working.
In the context of learning design, personas also provide an effective tool for communicating in general terms about learners within interdisciplinary teams; they provide a common vocabulary for discussions about the learner population.
It should be noted that in the work presented here, personas form part of a wider learner-centred design approach, but even without this, they seem to show a great deal of promise in learning design contexts.
3. Methodology
The methodology employed for deriving the personas involved the initial creation of ad-hoc personas (CitationNorman, 2004; Adlin & Pruitt, 2010) followed by the development of data-driven personas (CitationAdlin & Pruitt, 2010).
3.1 Ad-hoc personas
Ad-hoc personas were created in order to capture colleagues’ perceptions of the online distance learning student population. This involved discussions with programme administrators, educational technologists and tutors.
In general, colleagues characterised the online student population as being comprised largely of mature students, currently in full-time employment and seeking to obtain a degree in order to enhance their career prospects. It was also the view of colleagues that students on the programme would favour asynchronous activities over synchronous ones, as these would afford greater flexibility.
Finally, colleagues generally consolidated their perceptions of our student population into two personas: one persona representing our longest standing partner institution and a second persona representing “the rest of the world”. These ad-hoc personas went on to inform the criteria for developing the more detailed data-driven personas.
3.2 Data-driven personas
The ad-hoc personas provided a useful account of how staff perceived our online distance learning student population; however, in order to provide a richer foundation for our learning design work, it was important to capture a more detailed view of the online distance learning student population grounded in real data. The collection of student data was carried out in two stages, described below.
3.2.1 Online survey
An online survey was devised to gather demographic and affective data about the online distance learning population at the University of Hertfordshire. The survey was made available to all online distance learning students enrolled on the Computer Science undergraduate programme of study in August 2011. One hundred and ten students took part in the online survey. Participation in the survey was optional but as an incentive to take part, respondents were entered into a prize draw of four vouchers worth £25 each.
The survey was open for 10 days and it consisted of 22 questions covering:
Demographic data: age, gender, relationship status, nationality, country of residence;
Source of funding for their studies;
Educational background;
Leisure activities;
Employment status, and for those employed a brief description of their work;
Main ways of accessing the Internet;
Which social networking sites, if any, they use and how often;
What was their main motivation for joining an online distance learning degree;
What advice would they give a prospective student thinking of doing an online distance learning degree;
What benefits have they gained from studying online;
What challenges have they faced studying online;
Most and least important factors students should consider when enrolling on an online distance learning degree.
Participant responses were then analysed and amalgamated into twelve personas. It has been argued that anything beyond ten personas is likely to impair the usefulness of the exercise, as the personas would be become less distinguishable and memorable. Indeed, CitationCooper (1999) recommends that between three and seven personas are used; in a similar vein, CitationSaffer (2009) recommends between one and nine personas as ideal. In order to consolidate the existing twelve data-driven personas into a distinct and smaller set of personas, a number of interviews were conducted.
3.2.2 Interviews with students
A total of six interviews with online distance learning students were conducted via Skype. On average, each interview was 45 minutes long. The interviewees were based in the United Kingdom, Trinidad & Tobago, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. The interviews focused on the student’s motivation for studying online, their hopes and fears, and their expectations of how their learning would be mediated.
Findings from the interviews were then analysed and employed in order to consolidate the existing twelve personas into five personas, and these were given the fictitious names of: Tom Wilkinson, Olufela Olusegun, Chloe Nelson, Jean-Philippe Duval and Shanice Morton. The five individual resulting personas that were derived are shown in to .
illustrates how a persona was formatted for publication to staff. It should be noted that all personas were made available to staff as a printed A5 booklet, using the format shown in .
Table 1 Tom Wilkinson
Table 2 Olufela Olusegun
Table 3 Chloe Nelson
Table 4 Jean-Philippe Duval
Table 5 Shanice Morton
Figure 1 Sample of a persona, as published to staff.
4. Application
In order to present some of the ways in which the use of personas has informed the design and development of learning experiences, it is necessary to set out some context for the work. The authors use a pedagogical framework that supports the design and development of learning experiences for learners studying in flexible learning contexts (CitationPyper et al., 2007; Pyper et al., 2011). The framework uses the learning ecosystem metaphor in which participants within the learning ecosystem interact with the environment and each other within it. The learning environment is designed to support these interactions in a way that facilitates the development of Communities of Inquiry (CitationGarrison et al., 2000), as such, many of the media within the environment facilitate co-operative and collaborative interactions between participants within the learning environment.
In the context of formal learning, these interactions provide the lowest level of granularity of how learning experiences may be designed. Initially, however, learning experiences are couched in terms of objectives. The objectives are initially presented in a relatively open way and are set out in a narrative account provided by the tutor. Further, resources that are considered to be useful for the achievement of the objective are also presented.
Each objective includes a rationale for the learners’ work, the product that is expected from the learner to show that they have achieved the objective, feedback for the product produced. These are set out in the tutor’s narrative account and vary widely in their form. Product and feedback can be discrete and clearly defined (for example, the result of a diagnostic test), or be continuous and loosely defined (for example the progression of a learner’s thinking within a given topic). The key issue here is that learning experiences are inherently consequential; the use of objectives as the main structure for the design of learning experiences is motivated by this idea.
Learners can opt to use the objectives set at a high level as the basis for their studies in which case, learning interactions are very loosely specified; they are more likely to be emergent and directed by the learner themselves. Additionally, objectives are presented in increasing levels of detail; this is typically achieved by deconstructing each objective into its core, advanced and related elements as illustrated in .
Figure 2 Screenshot illustrating how objectives are presented
Core, advanced and related elements of each objective also have their own narrative account and resources set out. They also have products (what the learner produces and/or submits) and feedback. This increased specificity inherently represents the tutor’s conception of how the overall objective can be achieved. It is worth noting here that related elements of the objectives are intended to maintain the integrity of the interrelationships between different objectives and in doing so to place the objective in its broader context.
Finally, each of these objectives is further represented in even greater detail into designed learning activities; these are step by step guides to meeting the elements of the objective they relate to. Where tutors’ narrative accounts of the objectives have operated at relatively abstract levels, in the learning activities, they are specific even down to the level of individual interactions.
In short, the decomposition is presented as an option to learners; initially objectives are presented as authentically as possible and learners are encouraged to direct their own approach to them either individually, co-operatively or collaboratively with the support of the designed learning environment and interactions with tutors and other learners. Alternatively, learners may avail themselves of the much more closely guided interactions by following the tutors’ decomposition of the objectives. This is an important feature of the framework as it is unsafe to assume that learners have the necessary skills of self-regulation to learn effectively in a flexible learning environment.
So, the framework provides a structure and context for the learning experiences. It can be seen that the pedagogical structure itself is informed by the personas. In terms of the learner population, as represented by the personas, the framework allows Tom to study in his own way, to have the option of seeking more guidance in his work but acknowledging that he is likely to wish to simply direct his own studies. He may wish to refer to other members of the community, but this will be as and when he feels it is necessary. Tom is likely to be comfortable with tackling objectives at a high level with the support of the tutors’ narrative account of what he is expected to do and how. Tom evidences high levels of self-regulation, skills derived from both his professional and academic experience. He will study at his own pace, so synchronous sessions may not be an option for him.
However, for the others, the presence of the tutor is a key concern. One way in which the presence of the tutor may be represented is in the actual design of the learning experiences (CitationGarrison et al., 2000). The framework presents a strong narrative strand to provide a coherent account of what learners are being asked to do by the tutor. It is present throughout the learning experience with the intention of maintaining the presence of the tutor even when they are not directly interacting with learners.
Nonetheless, an interesting development in our learner population is the extent to which learners have moved from seeing their online work as being individual and asynchronous to seeing their work as including the presence of the tutor, particularly in terms of synchronous interaction. Previously this has not been the case, particularly given the desire for greater flexibility. Tom is representative of this previous attitude to learning online, but is clearly in a minority now. It has been noted that the framework itself provides for a substantive tutor presence, but there is a clear imperative for learning experiences to incorporate more synchronous elements. This is somewhat problematic given that the online degree programme is intended to provide significant flexibility in the way learners study. Moreover, the trend in this provision is to greater flexibility still.
However, consistently with the contemporary educational landscape in general, there is a growing preference for social involvement. This stands in contrast to previous indications — possibly related to the subject domain being Computer Science — that learners were happy to work independently and were not strongly inclined to become involved in social elements of the learning experiences available to them. We might have expected more personas like Tom in this respect, but here we can see that Shanice and Jean-Phillipe in particular value the ability to interact with other learners. It has been noted that social interactions, either co-operative or collaborative, are central to the framework.
One of the most useful aspects of employing personas is that the diversity of the user population becomes evident. For example, Shanice and Jean-Phillipe are likely to be concerned about how they would gauge that their studying pace “is right”. In our experience, learners such as Shanice and Jean-Phillipe find anomysed normative feedback useful (as it allows them to compare their performance with that of their peers), whilst Tom is not interested in how other learners are progressing as he sees learning as an individual pursuit.
However, as well as informing the pedagogical aspect of the framework, the use of the personas is perhaps even more pertinent to its technical implementation. Technical implementations of the framework contain tools and resources to mediate and enrich such interactions.
Tools used may be substantial generic tools such as an online discussion forum, or a web conferencing application. Equally they may be specific bespoke tools designed for particular learning experiences, for example an application to allow collaborative evaluation.
Resources refer to a diverse array of learning materials including animations, simulations, formative assessments, games and annotated papers. Moreover, to support the different ways in which learners may wish to engage with the resources key concepts and skills in given learning experiences are represented in different ways using different technologies. This is also informed by the personas; for instance, Olufela’s preference for videos.
Tools and resources provide a rich array of possibilities for supporting learner engagement in a given learning experience, but making pedagogically sound choices is non-trivial and for this reason, a learner centred design approach is being adopted by the authors for the selection or design and development of such technologies. Whilst a full account of learner centred design is beyond the scope of this paper, the approach allows for the involvement of learners at all stages of the implementation of learning technology including evaluation. Crucially the approach is founded on having a clear and data-driven account of who our learners are and their context of use and this is where the personas have proved such a useful addition to the practice of the authors and have influenced the technical implementation of the framework.
As an example, mobile devices are increasingly in use by our learner population; Olufela and Chloe both make substantial use of mobile devices and the transition in medium for the tutors’ narrative account from text to audio with a transcript has already been prompted by this. Additionally, discussion tools provided by the University’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) are available on mobile devices. The extent to which they will be used as a platform for other interactions, particularly as a platform to interact with resources, remains subject to further research.
It will be noted that Olufela uses his Blackberry to connect from home and this introduces another potential issue; the extent to which learners have the infrastructure to support synchronous sessions. These sessions have previously taken the form of tutorial sessions run through a web conferencing tool that are recorded and made available for those who were unable to attend. Here again, further research is required, however as before, there is a very strong basis for conducting the work.The work would involve learners who find themselves in the same position as Olufela and discussions within the design and development team would centre on these evocative accounts of our learners.
The combination of a demand for more synchronous session and use of mobile devices is evident for our undergraduate personas. The extent to which this is seen in our postgraduate population seems to be limited; early indications are that synchronous sessions are not strongly valued.
5. Discussion
The set of personas developed as part of the work reported here was distributed to staff involved with the programme. Programme administrators and educational technologists were very positive towards the approach.
Feedback from academic staff, however, was more equivocal. Issues around teaching workloads were raised; for example, one colleague stated that their workload is already high and it would be difficult to incorporate the personas into their practice. Some colleagues were very positive and indeed reported that the set of personas provided them with an insight into the student population that they did not have before; in addition they reported that they were likely to review their current practices in light of what they had learned. Finally, some colleagues were sceptical and expressed the view that, whilst the personas were representative of the student population, they already had a clear sense of who their learners were and, as such, the personas were unnecessary.
There is an interesting echo here of the idea that when mediating learning experiences using technology, much that had previously been implicit needs to be made explicit. Whilst tutors may be able to adapt synchronous face to face learning experiences as needed on the fly, this is much more difficult to do when they are mediated synchronously or asynchronously in flexible learning contexts. More has to be built into the learning experience up front in terms of its completeness and appropriateness for use in different contexts. Similarly, as noted by CitationAdlin & Pruitt (2010), part of the value of using personas is to make implicit information held by stakeholders, including assumptions about learners held by tutors, explicit.
In the context of the work presented here, personas have had two main impacts, the first is in communications about our learner population and the second is in identifying with our learner population. Overall, it is our view that the use of personas is an important tool in empowering colleagues to provide learning experiences that are more appropriate and engaging to students in flexible and distance learning contexts.
Finally, personas can be supplemented by scenarios that describe the context of students’ learning and their approaches to learning. This is of particular importance, given that one of the challenges of delivering computing education at a distance is to ensure that colleagues have an enhanced view of our distance learning student population. The development of scenarios of usage for the personas presented here is currently a focus of our work.
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