Mind Mapping For Design Process

Challenge    I am the headmaster of a high school and it is observed that the online system led to a

decrease in the general educational efficiency; including the students’ exam grades, class

participation, consistency of homework completion and etc. Our challenge is to enhance the

quality of education by exploring the aspects of how online school impacts the learning

experience, identifying the associated reasons behind the regression, and seeking possible

solutions to the issues in order to keep our education system back in rhythm. The solution is

roughly predicted to include a novel lesson schedule with altered lessons and hours that will

allow for any kind of additional support for the students, which will expectedly be prepared in

about 30 days. The project covers teachers(including counselors), students, the IT

department, and the school administration which are all considered to be some of the most

active stakeholders in this case. The focus will be upon figuring out how to remedy any kind

of technical, psychological, physical, or academic deficiency that the stakeholders face by

innovating our school’s current online education system.    Selection    Mind mapping is a tool that’s used to look for patterns and insights in a large quantity of data

while looking at the current reality. The main goal is to establish criteria for the “what if”

phase of design thinking by creating a mind map that will include various themes and

different ideas. The mind mapping process is used to capture and represent the minds of our

customers by allowing for their own perspectives.   We believe that the mind mapping tool will be an extremely efficient way to refer to various

problems of the situation at the same time since each of the stakeholders deal with different

aspects of online education every day. Putting the observations and data together and

considering different ideas upon them will make it much easier to make progress.     Application    Before applying the mind map, it was expected from the responsible group to comprehend

the findings well. The findings included the responses of surveys about the online system

sent to students, the counselors’ general notes about students’ psychological

conditions(after interviewing them during sessions), the teachers’ certain observations during

lessons, the feedback given to the IT department about the current digital lesson platform,

the school administration’s report of what is the hardest to cope with, and last but not least

the overall experience of each of the stakeholders. All of these inferences and findings take

place in the mind map as the general data. Our mind map group covers 30 teachers with the

counselors in order to gather the information that represents the minds of students, along

with the IT department that is capable of using the data to prevent technical and

technological struggles of the system and the school administration that will utilize the

findings to shape the system in the best way. Even though different stakeholders took place

in the mind mapping process, the main and common goal was to capture the students’

minds and determine what type of improvement(s) will be the best for them.   After analyzing the findings, turning analysis into “insight” led to different themes and

headings being about the main issues of the online education system being formed under

which each of the responsible group members were to mention different points, inferences,

ideas or any similar kind of brainstorming to take us closer to a student’s mindset in order to

figure out the main reasons and preparing the design criteria. Each idea about each of the

topics were considered crucial.     Insight    Applying the mind mapping tool brought us much closer to the point of view of a student.

First of all, we managed to classify the struggles under three titles: Psychological,

technological and physical. We deduced that even though we already considered the

psychological situations of the students, there might actually be much more going on in their

lives and their inner selves. Thus, our design criteria must consider solutions that will

maintain much more psychological support as a part of the regular class schedules. We also

came to the conclusion that the features of the platform used for online lessons and

assignments play a huge role in the academical efficiency. The fact that we are dependant

on the digital system right now makes it much more crucial to prevent the issues that are

caused by the platform’s technical deficincies. Last but not least, the physical conditions

such as access to internet and the technological devices result in some students dropping

behind the others. We concluded that the solutions we will seek for must be focused on

considering all of these aspects at the same time.   Along with all that we’ve concluded, the most interesting and critical result we deduced was

that the psychological, technological and physical conditions affect the other stakeholders

(especially teachers) as much as they affect the students. They undergo similar struggles

that we must consider while looking for solutions. This deduction of ours gave the project a

different direction.  Mind mapping personally showed me how many different views upon something might be

present that we cannot even think of, and how much they impact the general approach to

challenges. Some of the ideas that mind mapping tool presented us (including the outliers)

made me realize that gathering of single details might direct the process to a much different

way.     Approach     We believe that mind mapping was a highly suitable tool for this section of the design

process. My approach to the tool got shaped in a way that I perceive it as more than a tool to

simply brainstorm. It might actually require attentive analyzing skills.  However, visualization might have also been used in a scenario where the section of the

design process was closer to the solution. For instance, if generating a new platform was

one of the determined solutions, the tool visualization would be extremely useful to present

the features of the new platform and the lesson schedule. The platform’s appearance and

features would be annotated to present a detailed demonstration. The annotation would also

be able to embody how the system formed with the new platform and the altered lesson

schedule would refer to the issues identified in the previous sections of the process.

