Learner Personas

As part of the discussions with my LXD mentor on the process of designing Navigating Disruption, I created a set of learner personas to better understand the potential audience for the course. These personas were grounded in both assumptive and aspirational elements, drawing on motivations, professional contexts, and varying levels of familiarity with the content of the course.

Core Competencies

  • Integrating Inclusive Design Principles and Practices

    By constructing personas that reflected diverse levels of experience, access, and professional context, I was able to engage more deliberately with the course’s inclusive design. This process reaffirmed the intentional choices made to support learner variability from the start. Developing the personas also offered a clearer language for articulating how principles like UDL and accessibility were already thoughtfully integrated into the course experience.

  • Using Research and Evaluation Skills

    This activity provided a structured opportunity to evaluate the course from the perspective of two distinct learner profiles. By stepping into these learners’ mindsets, I assessed how the course structure, pacing, and examples supported their respective goals and backgrounds. This evaluative process sharpened my ability to interpret a course through the lens of learner experience. I practiced identifying potential gaps and affirming strengths in how the course addressed motivation, accessibility, and ethical engagement with content. It also pushed me to consider where additional scaffolding, media formats, or contextual framing might better support learners with different levels of prior knowledge. This experience deepened my understanding of reflective evaluation as an essential part of learning design.

Creating learner personas after the course had already been developed gave me a unique vantage point. It allowed me to reverse-engineer the design and think more concretely about how different types of learners might engage with the course. This process revealed how a design tool like personas can surface implicit assumptions, affirm inclusive intentions, and clarify how a course supports learner variability. It also shifted how I understand the role of documentation in the design process—showing me that personas can serve as powerful tools for reflection, not just planning. Stepping into the shoes of imagined learners led me to ask different questions—what the course offered and how its design aligned with the needs, goals, and experiences of those it aims to serve.