Reflection – Mind Mapping

Challenge

I work for a land grant higher education institution where the traditional focus of academics has been on  face-to-face instruction. Over the past decade we have started to expand our online course offerings  and enter the global learning environment but we have experienced push back from our tenured  faculty. We are a faculty-led institution where faculty governance rules and often times if we do not  have faculty buy-in for an initiative, it goes nowhere. My challenge, the Division has a new Director and  she wants to see us grab more of the online education market share – yesterday. We need to gain the  support of our faculty in order to build more programs (faculty are the content experts), figure out how  to make our internal processes more efficient, and grow our revenue by $20 million over the next five  years.

Selection

In an effort to find patterns and insights in the information we have been gathering, I am going apply the  mind mapping approach. Like in the case study MeYou Health, I want to understand the research data  before we start building programs and make sure we can successfully gain faculty support.

Application

My first step will be to start going through the data in a way that will sort by category and, hopefully,  reveal patterns within the information. We have data about faculty experience and satisfaction with the  online development process, their collaboration with our instructional design team, and overall  feedback from their online course offerings. Combing through this information will help us  understanding where the faculty are in their thinking and true perception around online learning.

We also have data from students that outlines their satisfaction of engagement with faculty, course  content, course quality, and navigation within our learning management system. Student data is  significant because they are a significant group of stakeholders for us. If students do not enroll and  complete a program then the courses and programs we develop do not matter.

We also have enrollment data, trend data, and detailed program data. I will begin by sorting and  categorizing this information in order to get the team to start generating ideas. I believe this will be an  effective approach since the team I work with is a data driven team and we sometimes get stuck on the  data collection piece. Mind mapping will help us move past that portion and into brainstorming.

Insight

Unfortunately, I have not been able to apply this mind mapping approach. I have not had the lead time  needed to gather my team, sort the data, and move into idea generation. I do believe that when I do the  outcome will be fruitful. We will have specific information to present to faculty that we will be able to  use that I believe will support the idea of collaborate in a way that is mutually beneficial. The goal will be  to gain their buy-in to support the growth we have been tasked to realize.

Approach

Next time, I will start this process of design thinking earlier. I will look for ways to incorporate the tools  of visualization, storytelling, mind mapping and learning launch. I know that I have been stuck thinking  about problem solving in a linear fashion, which I did not realize until this course, was narrow and most  likely short sighted.

