Female Student Personas for Educational Chatbots

This Open Educational Resource provides six empirically grounded learner personas of female STEM students as printable PDF cards. It aims at educators, (software) developers, and researchers who design support offers or conversational agents for STEM higher education. The material can be used for teaching (e.g., in courses on learning design, HCI, or educational technology), for co-design workshops with students and staff, and as a template collection for developing context-specific personas.

The Personas were compiled in a participatory, Design Thinking–inspired methodology grounded in user-centred design principles. The objective was to elicit authentic, learning-centred insights into female STEM students’ study experiences and translate these into empirically grounded learner personas for educational chatbot design.
The results were created with the following sequence:
(1) Interview of Empathy using a learning-focused question set to capture students’ study practices and learning experiences or habits
(2) synthesis of the interview material into tailored Empathy Maps to structure and consolidate key observations
(3) identification of recurring patterns and contrasts, and clustering these into preliminary profiles
(4) systematic refinement of personas
(5) validation of the personas with stakeholders

This project is co-funded by the European Union and co-financed from tax revenues on the basis of the budget adopted by the Saxon State Parliament (EU/ESF-PLUS: 100708140).