Use of Personas & Animation

Learn more about why using personas and animation can dramatically impact instruction.

Why create personas

Becoming an instructional designer is about creating instruction, material content, learning methods, and identifying who the learners are. As we've heard the expression many times before, "not one size fits all," education also isn't a one size fits all instruction. Instructional designers can't simply create one teaching design and expect all learners from different corporate companies or schools to understand and learn the new material. Because we know that every instruction is different for individuals, instructional designers must create materials according to the group of learners. To do this, we need to study the audience and meet the learning need of these learners to ensure that there isn't a gap in learning.

"Creating personas can help designers become more aware of their audience. Thinking through what a particular audience group needs and how they will react as they proceed through a course provides a tangible focus for the design. With a persona in mind, the designer might build more engaging lessons and discover new ways that learners can construct knowledge." - Connie Malamed

In identifying these personas within a specific job setting, the instructional designer can identify some similarities such as behavior characteristics, attitude towards the company, motivation level to learn new content, determine skill levels and etc., the instructional designer has a better viewpoint on the type of instruction that needs to be created for successful learning to happen within the company (Malamed, 2009).

Building diversity in personas

Now that we know the "why" in creating personas, now we must know how to create the personas that are not just from one perspective or view point. It is important that we create diversity within our personas so that content is not just one sided. Instructional designers know that learners have different methods of learning that they prefer, but without that information being readily available, the instructional designer must find ways to identify these learning styles. As Jensen (2020) mentions, Understanding the learning needs of every learner within a group helps the instructional designer create better training strategies that can support a wider range of learning styles.

Animation

Feel free to explore the digital world.

Using animation is not an easy feature to learn in web design, but it has many educational advantages. Because we know that learners have different methods of learning styles, creating animation for the purpose of educational use can allow the learners to retain more of the information being given if formatted in an animated form versus that of just oral memorization (Importance and benefits of animation in Education 2019). This is especially important in today's society where learners are constantly exposed to some type of animated visuals including commercials, gaming industry, food industry, educational programs, and more. Creating animated visuals for learners can help achieve the goal of learning new content in new visual ways that are accepted within the learners group.

References

Malamed, C. (2009, October 6). Learner personas for instructional design. The eLearning Coach. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://theelearningcoach.com/elearning_design/audience/learner-personas-for-elearning/.

Jensen, D. (2020, March 3). Using learner personas for empathy driven training. Using Learner Personas for Empathy Driven Training. Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://www.reflectionsoftware.com/blog/using-learner-personas-for-empathy-driven-training.

Importance and benefits of animation in Education. Best Animation Studios. (2019, September 2). Retrieved November 22, 2021, from https://beststudios.in/importance-and-benefits-of-animation-in-education.html.