Student Personas:
A Template to Create Personas for Course Design

​Use this template (PowerPoint document) to develop student personas. Personas will help you to design effective student-centered learning experiences.
A student persona is a fictional representation of a student, an archetype of a learner you may encounter in your classes and programs.

Using personas in design processes is not a new idea, it's a borrowed idea from other fields like marketing, recruitment, game design, etc. Educators can use personas to effectively design curriculum with a student-centered approach. 

A student-centered approach to learning design focuses on creating learning experiences that are motivating, enjoyable, and satisfying to your students; the aim is student engagement, success, and retention.

However, it's hard to be a student-centered curriculum developer when students are not sitting at the design table with you to remind you of their needs, interests, prior learning, goals, and expectations. How can you keep your focus on the students? Use personas!
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Create personas to represent students with different motivations, preferences, past experiences, goals, and expectations.  The personas do not represent any specific students you have had in your classes, they are fictional representations of made-up student characters with distinct motivations. 
 
Instructions:
  1. Begin with the 2x2 matrix (download template), to identify student motivation extremes, such as risk-adverse vs risk-tolerant or bold vs shy.​
  2. Then, based on the 'characters' you developed in the 2x2 matrix, create student personas. There is no one way to create a persona, this template is a tool you can use and adapt to meet your needs. Creativity and empathy is key! 
  3. If you prefer not to use the 2x2 matrix, that's fine too. Forge ahead! The 2x2 matrix is there to help you narrow down the many different motivating characteristics you see in your students.
Once you have created your personas, share them with your colleagues. Even better, get together with your colleagues in a faculty working group and collaborate on creating the personas together.

Make your personas visible. Print them, tape them to your office wall, add them to your design materials, make posters of them and hang them on a meeting room wall. After a couple of years, revisit the creative exercise again and produce a fresh new set of personas to help keep the students in focus.