This figure was so helpful and easy to use; however, I see the value of these being one-on-one or small group in-person because it's very difficult to gauge someone's thoughts or feelings on only paper.

Just as doctors and nurses are charged with having bad bedside manner for the very reason of lack of empathy with patients, so too can instructional designers who don't have learners in mind during the design process be considered out of touch and thus, produce bad designs.

I'm having some difficulty objectively separating the ideas of creation archetypes without the creation of stereotypes

In "building" course content, it seems I also follow this pattern: behaviorist to cognitivist to constructivist- very similar to the hierarchy seen in Bloom's taxonomy. I noticed in EME6609, my activities followed this pattern as well.

This helped to answer a previous question I had from the first article.

If a course is required as part of graduation or a prerequisite, does this question really matter in the creation of a persona for that course?

While I absolutely agree with this, it's hard to know for larger courses where every learner is in terms of background knowledge. I think this is why so many teachers begin courses with a review of what everyone should know- this gave me the idea to establish that baseline as the first module of my course.

I'm not surprised at all by these results, but also, I think this is exactly what we're going for: putting yourself in someone's shoes requires you to actually think about if you've also experienced something similar.

The narrative style and paragraph format of these these personas, without emphasis on aesthetics and readability makes this experience a really dry one.

I have a real tough time with this because if I were to create a mosaic of all my female AP Research students, for example, there would be contradictory information within- how do you navigator through so much seemingly contradictory information to create one "persona"?

How many personas should be created for the design of a course? Naturally, I'm thinking it should be based on the projected size and learner population of the course, but how does one get to that number?

I'm familiar with this research method in name only as I've rarely seen it used by students in AP Research, and it has on.y been explained to me by political science professors as a sort of forecasting method; I'm not sure I fully understand it used in this context.

I wonder if an industry-standard persona template is available or are there individually or company created formats?

This week really put into perspective the idea of empathy vs. sympathy. It's much easier to sympathize with someone because you're still creating understanding from your personal perspective, while empathy requires what Baaki & Maddrell suggest: putting ourselves in someone else's shoes. However, I think that's a lot more difficult than these activities suggest. In Dr. Schmidt's example of creating a course for parents dealing with a child's diagnosis, while we may sympathize with them as instructional designers and human beings, it's far more difficult to truly understand the depths and nuances and of their experiences. While empathy interviews certainly help, it can never replace the experience. I saw this as a mother whose son recently received a diagnosis and dealing with the feelings and thoughts associated with it. I don't know if there's truly an empathy interview that an instructional designer can use to gauge and truly understand and feel what I do.