Sarah Windsor - Primary Persona

Primary Persona - Sarah Windsor

Description

Sara taught at the University of Pennsylvania before joining MIT 2 years ago.  She is married with 2 kids and stays extremely busy teaching an undergrad psychology course for the 2nd year and a new on-line course in organizational management.  She is fairly comfortable with computers.  She's excited to be using technology to help with her teaching but she sees as a means to an end in order to stay in touch with students and allow them access to course resources when they need it.  In fact, the LMS will replace her face-to-face communication with students for her on-line course. 

She knows that even students she sees in class twice a week would like to her to be more responsive and looks to the course site to help with that.  She used Blackboard at PA and notices that she has expectations based on that experience...some good, some bad.

Goals

• Build on course materials from term to term
• Not to have to ask for help
• To spend as little time as possible doing administrative work; she'll delegate to her TA's
• To get tenure (get credit for tenure for everything she does)
• Use technology to help create an engaging and interactive environment for her on-line students where she can track their progress
• To be respected by students, colleagues and dean of school

Level of Expertise / LMS Use

• Teaching for 10 years, uses software apps like Word, excel, ppt, email, on-line research.
• Has used other LMS's and has used Sakai as a compliment to her f2f interaction with students in the classroom for 2 semesters.
• She interacts with the system a lot at the beginning of the term as she sets up her site.  Throughout the semester her use is sporadic.

Accessibility Considerations

Sarah as blind user. Since Sara is attempting to communicate more online this term with her students, some of whom may have disabilities, she will make extensive use of online communication tools. To do this:

She will need to have fully accessible tools for discussion and online chat:

1. Enabling her and her students with disabilities to respond to online postings;
2. Informing her and her students with disabilities of updated discussion threads and chat traffic; and
3. Facilitating her sorting of contributions by students and topics so she can evaluate them more easily.

She will also need to insure accessible visual content, including organization diagrams, bar charts, photographs of subjects, etc., including:

1. Descriptions of visual content in student submissions;
2. The ability to create visual content in text-based editor; and
3. The ability to tag visual content in text-based editor.