Building Empathy and Developing Instructional Design Experience and Skills: A Case Study of Using Personas to Design Open Education Resources
John Baaki, Jennifer Maddrell · Journal of Applied Instructional Design · 2020
This single case study involves the authors’ participation and observation of a massive open online course. To help instructional designers (IDs) develop open education resources for adults attempting to pass a United States high school equivalency exam, we constructed six personas that helped IDs put themselves in the users’ shoes. We begin by providing an overview of the scholarship that connects empathy, empathic design, persona construction, and meaning-making. After presenting our case study methodology and how we constructed six authentic personas, we present eight themes that demonstrate how IDs used the personas to build empathy for users and to develop instructional design skills and experience.