Personas Project: Informing Student Equity Initiatives in Higher Education

This paper reports on the development of a suite of student personas, based on the data from a survey of 983 students studying their courses online. This was part of a research project undertaken by the National Centre for... [ view full abstract ]

This paper reports on the development of a suite of student personas, based on the data from a survey of 983 students studying their courses online. This was part of a research project undertaken by the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education to better understand our students and to be able to link practice to policy within the academic context. Each persona represents an idealised student based on an equity group with similar attributes within the dataset. The suite of personas are designed to be used as a tool for solving complex resourcing and policy issues, based on real demographic information and interconnected issues that real students engage with, without exposing confidential student data. Such a resource can be used by both academic and general staff to better understand the types of students they need to deal with and ensure that university support mechanism match. The paper covers the process of developing the personas, including the suite of personas itself, and the features of the equity groups these personas represent, which have been discovered via regression analysis and synthesis of qualitative data.