How to Use a Design Persona
When trying to incorporate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) pedagogy into our course design we need to try and evaluate the learning barriers present in the course. Oftentimes instructors may draw from their experiences in previous course offerings, requests and conversations with students, or elements drawn from professional development. When designing something new, whether its a new learning activity, a new assessment approach, or even the first offering of a new course, you may not have an opportunity for true student feedback before deploying the course material. To self-evaluate these untested materials you may want to do some journey mapping using design personas.
The UBC Accessibility Toolkit is an excellent resource and includes some example design personas, some of which were contributed by the UPEI Teaching and Learning Centre.
It is important to understand that there are intended and unintended barriers in a learning activity. Often there will be an intended barrier to challenge the student for the development of their knowledge, skills, or attitudes. For example, a problem that moves learning from abstraction to a real-life example that requires the student to recognize abstract assumptions are still applicable and what no longer works in the real-life scenario. Other times these barriers may be inadvertent, for example a lab where students must hand draw a graph pH readings of a titration reaction may be a barrier for a student with a physical disability who would be unable to use their hands to draw that graph, but would still understand the lab and produce the graph using an Excel spreadsheet instead.
Understanding your learning targets for the course is important to identify which barriers are a necessary part of course learning and which can be modified or accommodated without diminishing the academic rigour of the course. For example, a student may have dyslexia and normally receive an academic accommodation for more leniency around spelling mistakes in assignments. However, in a language course where spelling words correctly to demonstrate an understanding of grammatical conjugation may not allow for that accommodation as it is an expected academic requirement of the course.
Once you’ve got your activity outlined, pick a persona, and ask yourself about how you would anticipate the student to experience the activity. What barriers will the student encounter? Are they legitimate academic barriers or are they unintentional barriers? Does this student’s perspective present an opportunity to adapt the activity to resolve it? Or might the student need an individual accommodation (e.g. time and a half to write compared to other students). After you’ve finished exploring using that student persona, move onto another. Repeat the process to evaluate the assignment from multiple angles and allow you to deploy the activity in a more accessible state.
With Universal Design for Learning, the “Universal” component is something to aspire to, not an expectation or guarantee. There will be students in your class that may have very unique experiences and your strategy may need to adapt and accommodate to ensure the student gets the learning they need from the activity. Using personas the first run of an activity can expand its accessibility as the first step of an iterative process where you reuse and redesign the activity into the future of your course.
If you have questions about using personas to develop your course activities, aggregating and implementing student feedback on an existing activity or other course design questions the UPEI Teaching and Learning Centre is happy to support.
Additional Resources
Accessibility Toolkit, 2nd Edition — BCcampus, Camosun College, and CAPER-BC
