For faculty and program administrators, the need to align programmatic learning outcomes with the shifting and diverse perspectives and motivations of students has never been more critical. Our department’s recent initiative to review and enhance these outcomes has brought to the forefront an exigence for grounding our efforts in the needs of our students.
Central to this endeavor is an analysis of our curriculum and outcomes from the perspective of learners. We have been looking for strategies to make appropriate updates by answering questions about our students, but to do this collaboratively, we needed to have a shared vision of our students. In a department that often teaches about instructional design and user experience, we decided that developing learner personas would be useful.
My approach stems from our commitment to not just describe our students, but to deeply understand and incorporate the unique backgrounds, aspirations, and challenges that students bring into our courses. AI, with its unparalleled analytical capabilities, offers a pathway to rapidly achieve this integration, enabling us to tailor educational experiences that resonate on a personal level and foster a more inclusive and effective learning environment. This article explains how we turned to AI to sculpt learner personas, marking a significant stride in bridging the gap between academic objectives and student realities.
The Use and Development of Personas in Education
Personas, in the context of educational design, are fictional profiles that represent key characteristics of learner groups. Well-developed personas, informed by attributes such as educational backgrounds, skills, behaviors, and training goals, can be instrumental in user-centered design approaches. Personas help designers develop a deeper understanding of the audience, so the goal of learner personas is to assist educators in tailoring learning experiences effectively.
There are several approaches to developing effective personas, which often involve various types of research and validation. This process can include steps like conducting interviews or gathering data about real or potential users, encompassing demographic details, daily routines, work environment, motivations, and learning preferences. Analyzing this data leads to the formation of representative, but often fictionalized, personas that reflect real user groups. Ultimately, the process of developing personas involves developing both realistic and representative descriptions that showcase the diverse needs and goals of learners. The creation of personas involves synthesizing complex information from several sources into accessible, relatable profiles.
Despite the usefulness of personas in educational design, a significant challenge lies in the limited resources and time available to faculty, especially for those engaged in service tasks. Typically, the creation of detailed personas requires substantial time and effort. This intensive process may be time and resource prohibitive for faculty who often juggle multiple responsibilities, including teaching, research, and administrative duties. Balancing these demands with the need to develop comprehensive learner personas highlights the necessity for efficient, streamlined processes that can deliver quality results without overburdening educators.
Crafting Learner Personas Using ChatGPT and Canva
This project employed a novel method leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT and Canva to develop comprehensive learner personas. The process was meticulously designed to encapsulate the diverse characteristics and motivations of students in our department’s programs. Here are the steps involved:
- Research and Data Collection with ChatGPT and Bing
- ChatGPT utilized Bing search to quickly aggregate current, publicly available information about our university and its programs, providing a foundational understanding of the learners we engage with.
- The AI sifted through data to discern why students are drawn to specific majors and how they perceive communication courses, a task expedited by Bing’s robust search capabilities.
- Developing Initial Personas
- Using the insights gathered, ChatGPT then formulated basic personas representing a variety of majors and backgrounds.
- This involved creating profiles with preliminary information about each persona’s background, interests, and motivations, ensuring a diverse representation.
- Refining Personas
- Subsequent interactions with ChatGPT involved refining these personas.
- Additional details were progressively added to each profile, enriching the personas with depth and realism.
- Generating Visual Elements
- For each persona, a corresponding headshot was generated. This visual element added a tangible aspect to the otherwise textual profiles, enhancing the personas’ relatability.
- Visualization Using Canva
- The final step was to transfer these detailed personas into a visual format using Canva.
- Each persona was transformed into an easily shareable slide, incorporating both the textual information and the headshots.
- This visual representation was crafted to facilitate easy comprehension and discussion within the department.
- Validation
- The personas were presented to faculty familiar with the program and the student body. During the validation phase, faculty discussed each persona based on their experiences. They noted the ways the personas aligned or did not align with the student body.
The combination of ChatGPT’s AI-driven research and content generation capabilities with Canva’s visual design tools allowed for the creation of learner personas that were both data-rich and visually engaging. This method provided a unique way to encapsulate the diversity and complexity of student backgrounds and aspirations, ensuring that our department’s learning outcomes are aligned with the real needs and expectations of our students.
Learner Personas as Reflective Tools
The culmination of our AI-assisted approach has yielded a suite of learner personas, each a vivid tapestry of student archetypes encountered within our educational environment. These personas, named Elena Ramirez, Michael Johnson, Aya Patel, Tyler Chen, and Olivia Smith, represent a spectrum of disciplines from Civil to Software Engineering, each with unique backgrounds, motivations, and learning preferences.
Elena’s sustainable urban development interests and collaborative learning style, Michael’s robotics passion and hands-on engagement, Aya’s healthcare-driven analytical approach, Tyler’s interactive software development enthusiasm, and Olivia’s environmental advocacy and data-savvy orientation are just a snapshot of the diverse student body we serve.
These personas, visually and contextually rich, now serve as a useful starting point for faculty to share their experiences with students and engage in curriculum review. By encapsulating students’ technical proficiencies, extracurricular activities, and learning styles, the personas give depth to the personalities being represented, making them more relatable and providing additional opportunities to re-imagine the ways students can relate to our course content.
The creation of learner personas through AI has demonstrated considerable benefits. The faculty noted that the personas were ‘idealized’ versions of the student body in that they make the students appear both self-motivated and self-aware. Still, the personas successfully led to in-depth discussion of student backgrounds and dispositions. The discussions enhanced the faculty’s empathetic understanding of the student body, fostering a user-centered approach in curriculum design.
The visual and narrative richness of the personas creates effective starting points for engaging multiple stakeholders in discussions about student needs, potentially leading to improved academic outcomes and student satisfaction.
The process of generating the profiles took about an hour in total. Depending on the prompting strategy, there may be significant danger of creating personas that fail to represent the student body, or maybe just reinscribing assumptions from the designer. Carefully managing the process to capture a meaningfully diverse set of perspectives while avoiding the reinforcement of stereotypes also requires attention throughout the process. In this case, carefully priming ChatGPT to first gather appropriate information appears to have worked well, but additional attempts and validation steps could be worthwhile.
With the limitations and dangers in mind, the adoption of AI-generated learner personas presents significant opportunities for faculty and administrators working on curriculum review. It suggests the potential of using nuanced, data-informed strategies that honor the individuality and real needs of students.