[DG: Teaching & Learning] Learning activities project: Persona follow up

[kamann at stanford.edu]

Hello,
There were three items I needed to follow up on after the persona check-in on February 9. 

First, there was some initial feedback from Ann and Robin where they wondered if the 12 personas we have covered our bases for learning activities. I address their concerns below and ultimately, I think they do

Second, I still need to follow up with a few schools who didn't participate in the user interviews but rely heavily on test and quiz functionality (CSU, Weber State, Rutgers. They may be able to supply more detail for the scenarios we develop—it's likely the situations common at those schools will map to a persona (and if not we may need to create another provisional persona)

Third, I wanted to post the presentation from Feb 9 but had to wait to purchase the stock photos for the personas. Those photos have now been integrated and the ppt presentation is located at http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/UX/February+8+and+9%2C+2010.

We have moved on and begun to write high level scenarios for these persona -–I'm about to send a separate email about that process. If you have any questions, let me know.

Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing, Stanford University

-Ann wondered if we needed a true instructional designer persona, a specialist who is knowledgeable about educational technology and curriculum design and does training on Sakai, rather than Amanda, who is an associate who does a lot of data entry. While we did get some interviews of instructional designers/technologists/consultants, they are more like what's known as a customer persona—someone who doesn't actually use a product but may evaluate/purchase the product. Examples include a mom who buys a video game console for her son. She tries to think through what would make her son happy, but we're better off just designing for her son, the primary persona. The exception would be if the console had some parental features in it, like a feature that limited the number of hours the son could play; then the mother would have her own interface and be a full-fledged persona. Ann came to the same conclusion independently "that an instructional designer persona would likely end up being a repeat of some or many of the instructor personas you have already defined." 
 
-Robin wondered if we might need another persona to represent an extremely senior professor, close to retirement, in the humanities who has no interest in Sakai per se, but "feels a strong desire to share the expertise that he has accumulated over many years." He has access to instructional technology consultants but doesn’t know what to ask them, but "He would appreciate some careful and tailored explanation of the facilities of a course website and some guidance on implementing his inchoate ideas for collaborative teaching." I gave this some thought. He sounds like the persona Bob, in that he has never taught online and in that he has access to a technology consultant. It certainly doesn't hurt to think about ways to make the capabilities of the system more obvious and explain terms and features in the design itself in case there is no one available to tell him what the system would do, (which would also someone like the persona Landon, who likes to just check stuff out independently). I think by addressing Bob and Landon, we will the needs of this fellow covered.