Attribution-based Personas in Virtual Software Engineering Education

The COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent introduction of virtual collaboration have introduced educators to unexpected situations and challenges. One of these challenges is social distance, which minimizes knowledge of another person’s character, and leaves room for misconceptions. Perceptions of a person’s personality are also referred to as dispositional attributions and, when misplaced, impact the educator-student dynamics. This paper studies dispositional attributions exhibited by software engineering educators in higher education and aims to raise awareness of potential misconceptions affecting the educator-student relationship caused by the virtual setting. We performed an exploratory case study in a practical university course with twelve distributed software engineering teams, each led by one or two educators. The course was conducted entirely virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research process included discovering, categorizing, and modeling attribution-based personas, followed by qualitative and quantitative research methods of semi-structured interviews and survey questionnaires. These personas represent the subjects of potential misconceptions and encapsulate typical behaviors and attributions. Our research created seven personas: the Unprofessional, Ego is the Enemy, The Detached, the Loner, the Underperformer, Hiding but not Seeking, and Distraction Monster. These personas differ primarily in terms of character traits and motivation attributed to them. The results provide evidence that the virtual setting of the course can lead to several dispositional attributions. Educators in virtual software engineering settings should be aware of these attributions and their potential impact on the educator-student relationship.