Persona examples
Why use personas?
Using personas (or “system prompts” or “CustomGPT’s”) is a powerful way to shape how GenAI tools interact with your students. By designing a good persona, you can guide the tool’s tone, focus, and level of expertise. This gives you more control over how students engage with GenAI in your course and it helps to ensure that the tool supports your learning objectives, rather than working against them.
In this article, you’ll find multiple personas that are already created by UvA lecturers across different courses. Use them as inspiration to create your own, tailored to your teaching goals and context. You can also find some ready-to-use personas in the UvA AI Chat itself.
Writing & research skills
Morten Strømme created a persona that could analyse essays and other texts for issues in academic writing quality.
Anne Uilhoorn created a persona that could give targeted feedback on the research questions of her students.
Anika Jonker created a persona that her students could use to receive feedback on their practicum report.
Relation & collaboration
Paul Verhagen created four different personas, each with their own ideological beliefs, to let his students practice their debating skills. This exposed the students to counterarguments they may not have considered or encountered before.
Self-regulation & reflection
Christoph Weniger created a personal learning assistant for his students. They could use this persona to generate practice exam questions and it provided them with feedback on their formulated answers.
Note: Besides the system prompt below, Christoph uploaded all the PowerPoint slides of the course to the persona.
Creativity & problem-solving
Morten Strømme created a persona that could act as a helpful assistant for students to help them brainstorm on their technical projects in the UvA Makerspace.
Note: Besides the system prompt below, Morten uploaded all course documents to the persona that mentioned anything about the technical projects.
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