Design Thinking for Innovation.  A New era of education.  By Hafiz Mat      Challenge & Selection    Faced with the problem of COVID-19, I have been thinking about how to provide  universities with quality virtual education options. In Colombia we have been in  quarantine for almost 3 months and we have realized that current platforms are  being used as a mediocre means of teaching, where teachers send PDFs, a good  teaching methodology is not implemented and there is no follow-up on student  requirements. To realize that this was a real problem and not rumors, we started  a process of identifying problems and solutions using techniques such as:    The tools required to identify the problem and detail it are:

● Map of actors: A review of each of the actors that are part of this  ecosystem was carried out to determine who influences our sales,  selection, usability and other processes.

● Covert observation: We requested permits from partner universities and  entered the current virtual classes to take notes of what was happening.

● Focus group: We called for groups of homologous characters that we  identified on the actor map.

The tools required to identify solutions and delve deeper are:

● 5 whys: we use this tool to be able to delve into the solutions identified.

● Selection by qualification: in the work team we began to qualify each of  the ideas, forming combos of them to strengthen the ideas and know  which one we would go for

● Competition analysis: According to the proposed ideas, we looked for  competitors who had similarities to determine points that are not being  addressed and add them to the ideas to be tested

● Interviews: We conducted interviews with actors who would use our idea  with a prototype version to identify more points that we should add or  remove.

Application & Insights:    As mentioned above, the following techniques were used:

1. Actor map: The actor map graphically reflects the connections between

the different users that make up a service. This helps to have a clear  image of the users involved in it, in order to identify the people to  investigate in the first phase of the process, or to structure the definition

of the functionalities of the final solution. An actor map is similar to the  following:

In our offices we sit down some of the team and professionals from allied  universities that would help us in the inquiry process. We discovered the  list of actors that would positively and negatively affect this project:

● User: teachers and students.

● Buyer: Academic direction of the universities. (Rector, vice-rector,  academic directors and researchers)

2. Covert observation: This activity consists of observing a user interacting

with a product, service or prototype, without them knowing that they are  being evaluated. It can be used in the initial phase of Empathy, to observe  the sincere reactions of the users.    We enter classes of our allies with the user of several students in different  classes and we participate as students in order to identify the  shortcomings of the teachers when giving the classes. We took note of  this and realized that teachers have not adapted to virtual education, they  only send readings and exams, without monitoring or controlling what  happens to students.

3. Focus group: Discussion groups or "Focus Groups" allow to deepen and

understand individual and collective perceptions, values ​and beliefs. It  brings us closer to the ways in which social subjects construct their

experiences and give meaning to their practices, based on their  sociocultural context and the relationship with the environment.    We use our offices to gather one person from each type of actor on our  map, we ask 5 questions with each of the 5 groups and we take note.    We realized the importance and relevance of doing a more advanced and  in-depth monitoring of the students than we had thought, this gave us the  basis to continue with our solution.

4. 5 whys: The technique of the 5 "why?" It is used when the interviewed

people respond with monosyllables or with short answers. To do this you  should ask again "Why?" for 5 consecutive times each time the person  interviewed gives us an answer. In this way, we will get to deep reasons  for the behavior or thought of that person.    With this technique we discover the way to determine how to do more  monitoring and establish better functionalities to our virtual education tool  to be more intuitive for users.

5. Selection by qualification: in this technique we proposed three ideas that

could work, Each of the group gave a value from 1 to 5, 5 being the  highest score, and thus determine the appropriate idea to solve the  problematic order of testing the prototypes.

6. Interviews: We conducted interviews with our prototype of around 20

people to see if it was a better or worse solution than that of the  competitors.

Approach:    All this gave us the opportunity to rethink our initial idea, modify the monitoring  and control strategies of the student, the user interface and move from  E-Learning to B-Learning. Therefore, we will describe the changes and  adaptations to be made to continue testing our innovation.

1. Monitoring and control strategies: in the digital tool we will implement

Watson's APIs for virtual education and thus be able to obtain detailed  advances in the training process of the students.

2. User interface: testing our ideas in interviews and with experts we realized

that we had processes that were repeated and others that were not  necessary.

3. From E-Learning to B-Learning: B-Learning presents an updated teaching

methodology that involves the presence and virtuality integrated to show  the student improvements in their training process.

