Personas as a Powerful Methodology to Design Targeted Professional Development Resources
Scaling and sustaining educational innovations is a common problem in the learning sciences. Professional development resources around educational innovations that are personalized to appeal to the needs and motivations of different types of faculty offer a possible solution. The method of developing personas to represent key types of users is commonly employed in user interface design and can be used to produce personalized resources. Personas are fictional named archetypes of users encompassing generalizations of their key characteristics and goals that emerge from interviews. This method is especially powerful because personas succinctly package information into the form of a person, who is easily understood and reasoned about. Herein we describe the creation of a set of personas focusing on the needs and motivations of physics faculty around assessment and teaching. We present the personas, a discussion of how they inform our design and how the method can be used more broadly.
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