An Attempt towards teaching and Learning using Personas

Abstract

Teaching and Learning in the continuum of time is an oldest and will be the latest trait till the doomsday a human being shall encounter without any iota of doubt. It has been experienced that both teaching-learning are mutually exclusive traits yet the shared experience is result of various knowledge and psychologically driven aspects from both teachers and learners alike. Over the period, various teaching and learning theories have been developed by Social scientists and educationists which comprehensively cover all aspects of supervised and unsupervised modes of pedagogy. With E-technologies in place, the challenge of proper teaching and learning has opened up a plethora of issues primarily arguing on the diminishing layer of teachers by technology. The role of teacher is visualized more as intelligent content manager for e-learners. As a result in recent studies more emphasis has been given on learning management system (LMS) and multimedia technologies for content presentation. We have in this dissertation revisited the centuries old problem of mapping right role of teacher with intended learners‟ profile to maximize the best teaching-learning experience. As a result, contrary to few other researches which focused on enhancing e-learner experience, we have modeled using personas of the teachers and their changing roles by identifying the learners‟ behaviors. Using HCI‟s famous UCD approach personas of teachers based on famous Kolb‟s learning styles model has been developed. Comparisons and results were tested on university undergraduate students in a distance learning set up and in physical classroom set up. Analysis of results using Bayesian Networks was carried out showing that proper mapping of students‟ behavior in usage of e-learning system with varying roles of e-teacher is an area which enhances the overall pedagogical (teaching-learning) experience. Suggestions on improvement as identified through a literature as a major gap in e-learning solutions have been presented and concluded with.