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The concept of persona is widespread in marketing and software development, but here I will argue that personas are extremely helpful to design courses: Rather than designing a course to a fictitious person with a multitude of general characteristics, you pick one specific person you know and design the course to that specific individual.
Why? Because it is easier to create a course to a real individual rather than this amorphous average person. For example, if a question arises on whether a certain feature would or would not be useful in the course, you simply ask whether that persona would like to have that feature or not. If the answer is yes, do it, otherwise discard it.
Now, although what I just described is the most classical definition of a persona, I will call this simply one out of three possible personas. Specifically, I will call this previous description a top-down persona, or a persona that was developed out of our general beliefs about who the average customer would be like.
In contrast, a bottom-up persona is the persona that emerges from a data set with a large number of people. For example, if a course has three different versions, then the persona preferring the first version of the course will be characterized by a certain age, gender, income, etc. Once those characteristics are known, then a specific person with those characteristics will be chosen to represent the actual persona.
Bottom-up personas can be created through common statistical and data mining algorithms, and can be more detailed than the top-down persona. That said, bottom-up personas can only be defined once we expose a group of people to a course or to a pretty reliable description of what that course will look like and do. In other words, without a course or a proxy a bottom up persona cannot be created.
The third and arguably the most interesting type of persona is the n-of-1 persona. In this scenario an individual is submitted to a series of randomized tests where the persons’ response to certain stimuli within the specific course. For example, if I want to know whether a certain person likes videos or texts within a course, I first expose that person to a video and then later expose her to a text. This experiment could be repeated a number of times to ensure that our information on what that person likes is accurate. We can then proceed to test other characteristics. The n-of-1 persona is probably the most reliable as it is the direct result of experiments with a given individual.
Of importance, there is really no ranking among the three types of persona as the three are used in conjunction. You simply keep creating them as you go and then combining as needed while developing the course.