Design thinking tool – Learning launch

Challenge

I am one among the five members of the operations club in my college.  As one of the best performing  clubs in the college over the previous years, we are expected to keep up the legacy. But due to this  unprecedented COVID situation, all of us are stuck at home and are now required to work remotely. Our  responsibilities as the office bearers of the club is to conduct and organize events for our junior batches  (110 participants) in the academic year. The minimum number of events that we conduct in a year in 5.  Now that we have no choice of one on one interaction with the students, we were forced to adapt to  the situation and conduct the event virtually over a video conferencing platform.

Selection

Having undergone multiple brainstorming and mind-mapping sessions, we were at the final stages of  discussion and decided on doing a learning launch to test the feasibility of conducting events online. The  learning launch would give us feedback about our plan and allow us to iterate our ideas so as to make it  a worthwhile and engaging experience for the participants. The learning launch tool is a testing process  using a prototype and a small sample where we check if our assumptions were true or false.

Application

The learning launch process started with having discussion with our mentor. We enquired about the  process and requested inputs from him. The topics discussed were about the duration of the events,  how to ensure that the participants are actively engaging and learning from the event. The  infrastructural roadblocks like drop in connectivity and other bandwidth related issues.

Followed by this, we started surveying a selected group of actual participants. We asked them about  their preferred choice of video conferencing platform and how would they like the events to be  conducted so that it is worth their time. Other inputs like the day of the week and the suitable time to  conduct the event was also taken.

Next, we organized and conducted the event amongst ourselves and a few other participants who had  no prior experience with using the video conferencing platform to see if they are able to participate and  having an engaging experience during the entire process. We tested if the conference was able to  handle the number of participants and the resources to be shared without any interferences. The  feedback obtained was to make the conference more interactive by conducting polls and quizzes to  keep the participants are actively involved so that they don’t get distracted in between and engage in  other activities because it is practically impossible to monitor each one of them individually.

Insights

By applying the learning launch tool, we were able to identify the gap in conducting the event online.  Taking the feedback from the prototype we were able to redesign the whole process by now  incorporating interactive activity among the participants by asking them to take a quiz in between the  session and announcing the results. Giving the participants the opportunity to ask doubts and express  their opinion ensured higher satisfaction amongst the participants. Also, keeping the event short (30  minutes) helped us in conducting the event successfully by mitigating the issue of the participants  getting carried away

Approach

Our team had to go through a lot of conflicts because of the clash of ideas and the shortage of time and  of course the problems that comes with working remotely. At this stage, the learning launch tool is  appropriate and the best way to test our assumptions and validate it. Keeping in mind the feedback and  the insights we gained from our previous event, we used the learning launch tool at the final stage of all  the remaining events before launching the event in a large scale to test its efficiency and success rate.

