Our learning programmes are designed to reflect our institutional specialisms and priorities, to play to our strengths. Sometimes we risk forgetting that they will be taken by real people with different dispositions, orientations and perspectives. For this reason, the first stage of my 8 Stage Learning Design Framework is concerned with profiling students. Much the same way that any product designer asks ‘who is my customer going to be?’, we need to do the same thing in education. I’m sharing here a process in which we describe between four (five or six works too) imaginary individuals who are as different from each other as we can imagine as our potential students. I advocate a diversity matrix to build these characters, articulating different dispositional, educational, circumstantial and cultural parameters. We then run these user-cases through four further perspectives to reassess their discipline orientation, learning orientation, personal context and social context. There are overlaps and contradictions, a creative tension that reveals the strengths and relative weaknesses of any potential programme design. See the Research pages for more of Student Profiles
Watch out for workshops at Learning Design Workshops