Using personas to promote inclusive education in an online course

Abstract

Inclusion and diversity are themes at the forefront of education development and the subject of much institutional level policy. However, there are differences that can be made at the course or even module level by local teams that will both compliment institutional policy and have an immediate impact on students. This paper aims to describe the process taken to embed diversity and inclusion into an online career development short course. We will explain how user experience personas, created in the design phase of the course, developed into an integral part of the course curriculum and how they are used to show diversity to a fully asynchronous online cohort. We discuss how theories of pedagogy and design can be combined to have a positive impact on the sense of belong for all students. Finally, we explore how these theories can be applied to wider practice and offer suggestions for how other courses can use our process to embed elements of diversity into their programmes, and hopefully increase a sense of student belonging.