They want their clients to be the main focus of the design process to build an engaging and relevant course. Learner Personas are fictional characters, and It is a vital tool in the eLearning industry. In this article, we will discuss how we improve your online training course by creating learner personas.
Creating Learner personas
1. Gather user information
Information is vital when creating your learner personas. Employ quantitative data and qualitative data analysis. It ensures that your learner personas are an accurate representation of your target demography rather than a projection of what you think your learners are.
Gather quantitative data from your LMS (learning management system), surveys, or from the human resource team. The type of users quantitative data that gathered include the number of learners, what they do? What activities are they engaged in most? The favorite or challenging topics? What are their favorite categories or areas of interest?
Furthermore, gather qualitative data by one-on-one interviews, focus groups, ethnographic research, and observations. Ask your learners questions about who they are? What do they want to accomplish from learning? What type of information they are looking to get. The interview is an effective way because you will be able to connect with their stories.
2. Analyze and summarize information
Collecting user information is not enough to build learner personas. You must effectively analyze and summarize them to utilize them. Look for similar trends and rare traits, group them. Flesh out the persona and write a descriptive profile of the hypothetical learners. Give the persona a name based on the real individual of the learning group. You can use a form to arrange persona characters.
Spice it by adding an image to the persona. However, the analysis and summary is a vital step in creating your learner personas. You may want to take your time while analyzing and summarizing learner data. Work with your team to create your persona for effective and quick results. Repeat the process and come up with collections of different personas. diversify in many possible ways.
3. Use the personas
At this stage, you should have a collection of learner personas, a representation of your learner. You can only improve your eLearning training if you effectively utilize your learner personas. Ensure that these personas are the main focus when designing your eLearning courses. Share the personas with every member of your design team. Refer to them as if they are real learners that are to take the course. Ask questions that will make you serve every persona.
For example, let’s use Ella (an already named persona). You could ask questions like what does Ella know about this course? What design element to help Ella relate to the course better? Would Ella like to spend her time playing this game? By answering a series of questions, you would have created an eLearning course to meet the persona’s group expectations.
4. Additional tips
A group of people has argued that learning personas are a distraction, while another group supports the fact that learning personas have helped connect more to their audience. They concluded that personas are not a good approach to recognizing the needs of the audience. The other party believes that personas help to solve learning problems from the learner’s perspective. And it caters to different learner’s needs during learning.
However, my recommendation is that you try learner personas the next time you develop your course and consider using the tips below.
- Try to have a conversation with a sample member of your audience group.
- Ensure that the use of personas helps your team personalize the design.
- Build empathy for the audience groups. The more you can imagine their story, the more you understand who they are.
- Build your personas based on realistic profiles of your audience.
Conclusion
To improve your learner’s learning experience, the learner personas should be relevant. And based on the experience of the real individual, that is an accurate representation of your learners. By building rich and relevant personas, you are creating the foundation of a relevant and engaging eLearning training course.
Although, building learner personas can be time-consuming. And I will advise you to take enough time when creating the learner personas. However, it does have to be arduous. Have fun with it, be creative, and develop the characters. If done correctly, it will help boost your learner and increase productivity.
