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Duration
6 weeks
21 hours of learning
Design thinking in education
Discover how design thinking can transform your teaching practices and help you create engaging, impactful learning experiences. This human-centred approach reimagines education, empowering you to foster creativity, collaboration, and innovation in your classroom.
In this course, you will explore the five key stages of the design thinking process through a step-by-step journey. Gain hands-on experience with practical tools and activities that bring each phase to life. Develop essential competences in observation, reflection, and collaborative problem-solving, enabling you to guide your learners toward meaningful outcomes.
By the end of this course, you will be equipped to design creative solutions for real educational challenges, lead your learners through the design thinking process, create dynamic and interactive learning environments, and champion innovation in your educational community.
In this course, you will explore the five key stages of the design thinking process through a step-by-step journey. Gain hands-on experience with practical tools and activities that bring each phase to life. Develop essential competences in observation, reflection, and collaborative problem-solving, enabling you to guide your learners toward meaningful outcomes.
By the end of this course, you will be equipped to design creative solutions for real educational challenges, lead your learners through the design thinking process, create dynamic and interactive learning environments, and champion innovation in your educational community.
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Empathy maps are visual representations that help you organise and synthesise the information collected during interviews or observations. They are divided into four quadrants: what the learner thinks and feels, what they see and hear, what they say and do, and what are their pains and gains. Empathy maps provide a holistic view of the learner's experience and emotions, making it easier to identify patterns and opportunities for improvement.
Conducting one-on-one interviews with learners or potential learners to gain insights and understand their needs, desires, pain points, and behaviours. Open-ended questions and active listening techniques help you uncover valuable qualitative data and personal stories that can inform the design process. The interview doesn’t have to be a long one or a formal one and even 10 to 15 minutes with a cup of coffee can provide you with insights to get you started.
Personas are fictional, yet data-driven, representations of your learners. They are created based on the insights gathered during the empathising phase and include demographic information, behavioural traits, motivations, and goals. Personas humanise your learners, making it easier for you to empathise and design with specific individuals in mind, rather than an abstract group. A hint: you can select a real-life person for this exercise, it works as well.
Actively observing and shadowing learners in their natural environment allows you to gain a deep understanding of their behaviours, challenges, and needs. This tool involves immersing yourself in the learner's context, observing their actions, and documenting their experiences. It helps uncover insights that learners may not be able to articulate in interviews.
Surveys and questionnaires provide a quantitative means of gathering data about learner preferences, pain points, and needs. While they may not provide the depth of insight that interviews and observations do, surveys can help you collect a wide range of responses from a larger group. They can be especially useful for validating qualitative findings and understanding trends.
A well-crafted problem statement is the foundation of the defining phase. It helps articulate the specific challenge or issue that you aim to address. It should be concise, focused, and structured, ensuring everyone involved understands the problem's scope.
POV statements distil the learner's needs, insights, and desires into a clear, learner-centric perspective. These statements are typically framed as "Learner X needs Y because Z." They guide the design process by ensuring solutions are aligned with the learner's requirements.
HMW questions reframe problems as opportunities. They encourage creative thinking by asking, "How might we solve this problem or address this need?" HMW questions inspire ideation and open up possibilities for potential solutions.
User journey maps visually depict the learner's experience with a product or service, highlighting touchpoints, emotions, and pain points. This tool helps define the problem by providing a holistic view of the learner's interactions, allowing you to pinpoint areas that need improvement.
Brainstorming sessions involve (a group of people) generating a large number of ideas without immediate judgement. The goal is to encourage free thinking and creativity, fostering a diverse range of potential solutions. No one says “no” at this point!
With your learners: It is good to have your learners work in small groups so that everybody will have a chance to get their turn in sharing their ideas.
With your learners: It is good to have your learners work in small groups so that everybody will have a chance to get their turn in sharing their ideas.
In this brainstorming technique, the participants write down their own ideas each within five minutes without talking, passing their ideas to the next person to build upon. This rapid idea exchange fosters a high volume of creative solutions in a short amount of time. NB! Requires more than 1 person
With your learners: Here you can divide the learners into groups, and depending on the group size, they’ll have several or a few rounds with the same cards.
With your learners: Here you can divide the learners into groups, and depending on the group size, they’ll have several or a few rounds with the same cards.
Mind maps visually organise ideas and concepts, allowing you to explore associations, connections, and variations of a central theme or problem. This tool helps in breaking down complex problems and identifying potential solutions.
Storyboarding is a visual tool commonly used in the context of product or service design. It involves creating a series of sketches or images that depict a learner's journey or interaction with a solution, helping to visualise and refine ideas.
Role-storming involves participants adopting different personas or roles, such as that of a learner, competitor, or famous personality, to view the problem from various perspectives. This tool can lead to fresh insights and creative solutions.
With your learners: Ask them to think what roles might be affected by the problem or which roles could somehow contribute to it. Then in small teams let everyone select and enter a character, and the team starts gathering different ideas from these perspectives.
Idea cards or ideation games provide participants with prompts, challenges, or constraints to spur their creative thinking. These tools offer a structured approach to generating ideas and can be especially useful in group settings. An even simpler version of this is to use an image or a pack of photos and let people pick one: what does it bring to you, how could you connect it with the problem at hand?
Storyboarding is not limited to ideation; it can also be used in the prototyping phase to visualise learner journeys and scenarios. It helps identify potential pain points and areas for improvement.
Paper prototypes are low-fidelity representations of a product or interface created using sketches, cutouts, or drawings. They are used to quickly visualise and test design concepts before investing in digital or higher-fidelity prototypes.
You can build a 3D model of your prototype using, for example, cardboard, legos, or any materials that you can find easily around you. This encourages you to think resourcefully and creatively, making use of readily available materials to bring ideas to life.
Usability testing involves having real learners interact with the prototype and providing feedback on its functionality, ease of use, and overall user experience. Observations and feedback are critical for refining the design.
With your learners: You can ask your learners, for example, to organise an event where they invite other learners and have them interact with the prototypes.
A/B testing compares two or more variations of a design to determine which one performs better with users. It's commonly used for websites and apps to optimise features, layouts, or content.
With your learners: If your learners created different versions of the prototype or ended up making another, improved version of their first prototype, they could test both prototypes to see which seems to work better.
With your learners: If your learners created different versions of the prototype or ended up making another, improved version of their first prototype, they could test both prototypes to see which seems to work better.
Surveys are used to gather quantitative data from learners regarding their experiences with the prototype. Questions can cover aspects like satisfaction, ease of use, and preferences.
With your learners: Have your learners brainstorm in groups, what questions should be asked in a survey to be able to get the right answers. Are they multiple choice questions, open questions, yes/no questions?
In a prototype walkthrough, you or your team member guides learners through the prototype, explaining its features and gathering feedback at various stages. This method allows for real-time feedback and insights.
With your learners: You could choose to have the groups present the prototypes to each other as they have more information about the earlier phases but have slightly different points of view to the solution. Alternatively, your learners could walk other learners/different audiences through their prototypes. This could bring in fresh insights to the prototype as they don’t have the preliminary information about the earlier phases or the process.