Why Learner Personas Improve eLearning Outcomes

When building training content, whether for an internal corporate learning environment or as part of your learning and development offering, you need direction. 

What is the purpose of the training, what should learners take away after finishing the course, and who are instructional designers making this program for?

If you have the answer to the last question, it can provide insight into how to write, present, and engage learners with the content. That’s why it’s important in instructional design to know and build learner personas.

What are learner personas?

Learner personas, also known as marketing personas or learning personas, are strongly developed characters that represent the audience groups you are designing for. 

They’re entirely fictional, but share common characteristics with actual learners. These characteristics include their jobs, responsibilities, and training goals as well as more broad traits like education level, skills, hobbies, and general attitudes.

How Personas Improve Instructional Design 

They Help You Understand Your Audience 

Knowing who your audience is and how they need to be learning can take a boring, generic lesson plan and turn it into a totally personalized learning experience. When learner personas are created and utilized before building a digital, in person, or hybrid training, your L&D team’s training materials are more streamlined and successful.

They Can Inform The Type of Content Included in Your Training 

Speaking to your audience in the learning language they perform best in is good, but personalizing the type of content they respond better to is great. Trainers and designers building in person learning and digital training content can both reap the benefits of using learner personas to personalize learning experiences for their audience. Videos, powerpoints, one-pagers, and more can all be included or removed from a program based on how learner personas respond. 

Using a digital content distribution platform can make this easy for learning and development teams and their trainers to manipulate the content mediums available to their learners. Mimeo has a digital content delivery system that allows trainers to easily share their content digitally without sacrificing learner engagement. Plus, it keeps your IP secure and allows learners to access content anywhere there’s an internet connection. 

Learner Personas Establish Consistency Across Your Entire Program

Stakeholders, your L&D team, and your designers need to fully understand your audience before building a consistent program. By referring back to the learner personas you created while building your program, you’ll create consistency across the entire training program, no matter who is building each piece.  

If you’ve built your learner personas and are ready to take your user-centered design to the next level, sign up for a Mimeo Digital account. 

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