Reflection - Learning Launch

1. Challenge: I work in an educational institute. As part of the institute I deal with students,

teaching and non-teaching staff. There are a number of activities that require streamlining  and innovative way of implementing to get desired results. It could be activities like  improving bonding of alumni with the students, improving scores of students in certain  government exams, poor participation of faculty or students for certain activities, improve  relation between the teaching and non-teaching staff and so on.  One such challenge we  faced was when the Institute offered two courses which are mandatory for students of  Second year and Third year to attend

i.  Intended to improve creative thinking which stretches over 3 semesters

ii.  Intended to improve research skills which stretches over 1 semester

Both these courses are an initiative by the institute to improve student’s skills. These  courses are not part of the university curriculum and hence the grades of these courses are  not mentioned in the university grade sheet. There are observations made of students  attending and submitting course work of courses that are part of university curriculum but  not for the above mentioned two courses. There is a growing trend of students not  attending the sessions conducted and disinterest in completing the course work. It was a  matter of concern because investments were made for conducting these courses in terms  of resource, time and money and the outcome expected for the courses were not observed  in the projects done by the student in the following year. So the challenge was how to  improve the participations of students in these courses.

2. Selection: Based on the problem data was collected in terms of qualitative data as well as

quantitative data. The collected data gave rise to many assumptions about the cause of the  situation and there was a need to understand if these assumptions were the real the cause  of the problem. Since we have 20 batches with 20 students in each batch for each of the  semester we selected the learning launch tool to test the assumptions on each batch to  understand the real truth of the problem. Learning launch help to try and test the  assumptions made in short time. In the institute it very easy to implement the learning  launch tool to get through the core of the problem. It helped in understanding what the truth  behind the guesses made is, and go ahead with confirmed assumptions quickly.

3. Application: So there were 40 batches in total and spread over session of 2hrs over a week

in 3 different space or classroom allocated for the same. Each batch was used to test two  of the hypothesis. Some of the assumptions tested was:

i.  If students weren’t aware of the time, these sessions would be conducted  with greater no. of students at any time. – Planned session which didn’t  reflect in the timetable were conducted which definitely improved the no. of  students but with disinterest.

ii.  Looks and feel of the room would bring a positive change – It brought no  change

iii.  Orientation of the program was conducted with detail discussion of the plan  as it was thought students were not made well aware about it. – No change  was observed.

iv.  Final year projects were allocated earlier to the students so that the students  felt a need to do the course for their project. – Quite a positive change was  observed in some patterns of combination of particular batch and teachers.

And many such assumptions were tested.

4. Insight: These test that were conducted showed that it was not alone a result of student’s

ownership that would bring improvement in participation for the course but also about the  faculty ownership. And better performance was observed from faculty and students when  the mentor of the batch was taking the session. Although the team members who were  working on this problem were from different domains there was one thing common and  that was all were teaching staff and this had led to a biased assumption that the main  problem was only the attitude of the students which was proved wrong by the Learning  Launch tool.  Mentoring, Project Allocation and These courses were always considered as  separate entities but this process of applying design thinking highlighted how different  process are interlinked. They had to be combined to improve the student skill especially  when the course is a non-graded one. The teaching staff other than the mentors showed a  reservation in giving input to projects other than theirs which was not the same in case of  the student mentor. Also the student required to thinking and give their opinions because  it required to be a very interactive sessions and they were at ease with their mentor. And  students were self-motivated to attend the course to get insight on how to best do their  projects for the final year. They felt they were solving their problems.

5. Approach: I would like to use the Mind mapping tool. It looks very promising of being

able to give good insights and to observe patterns and behaviour of the observation  collected. Also it would be a better way to present the observations to the management for  their easier understanding.

