Week 5-Final Peer Graded Assignment-Design Thinking for Innovation

1.Challenge

I work in a mid-tier Business School in India offering Post Graduation in Management stream. It  is a Classic case of a PG Management School which still adopts Class Room Teaching at the core  of its pedagogy wherein I currently work as a Professor. School is the second best school in the region operating under University affiliation structure in  which it has to follow the University stipulated syllabus and the programme schedule. It is becoming more and more challenging to engage the students in the classroom. A common problem faced by most of the teachers is ‘Engaging the students’ in their class room  sessions. Thus the challenge was ‘How to meaningfully engage PG Management students and bring  about effective class room Learning?’

2.Selection

The tools used for this assignment are mentioned below along with the reasons-

 Visualization- Visualization is about using imagery to make an abstract idea more public  and more concrete, so that it will be more visible, clear, and understandable to others.  (Ref: Course Video Week 1 by Angela Meyer). Visualization was best suited for  understanding ‘What is ‘and ‘What if’ as the situation required qualitative approach and  Inductive thinking was found to be insufficient.  Mind Mapping- Mind Mapping is an extremely important tool as it acts as a connector  between ‘What is ‘and ‘What if’. Mind mapping provides a Segway from what is to what  if.  Its ultimate goal is to establish criteria for the ‘What if’ step of Design Thinking (Ref:  Course video Week 3 by Sutton-Darden). This tool was selected as it was  important to know how teacher looks at his lectures and at the same time what do  students expect from a class room lecture and what appeals to them? (Separate maps for  teachers and students). Furthermore, Mind maps were used to arrive at ‘Design Criteria’.  Learning Launch-Leaning Launch is used as a tool to test the ideas. All ideas cannot be  tested by ROI approach especially while venturing into unknown. When the problem at  hand is purely Qualitative (Student Engagement in class room) Learning Launch helps as  it is ‘Quick and Economical’ (Ref: Course video Week 4 by Steve Sutton)

3.Application

Application was a 3 step process

Step 1 –What is Visualization-Students were asked to draw their imagery of the existing class room sessions using  diagrams, arrows, figures and even words. At the same time, Teacher also had his Visualization about existing class room teaching methods. Besides Visualization, depth interviews and informal discussions with students were also used  Thus this step helped to understand the ‘What is’ scenario. Step 2- ‘What is’ to ‘What If’ Mind Mapping as a technique was used here with ultimate objective of arriving at Design Criteria  for the ‘What Wows’ step. This meant teacher and students together worked on Mind Map to understand ‘What could it be  that shall make the Class Room sessions more interesting?’ Various Alternative Teaching approaches were prepared with varying proportion of the design  criteria along with delivery and assessment framework.  Step 3-Learning Launch After understanding the design criteria and subsequent propositions, Learning Launch was used  to understand ‘What Works’? Class Room sessions were conducted new with alternate teaching approaches and subsequently  student feedback was gathered to understand what works? Besides the student feedback, the  assessment was also done to measure the performance of the students. Thus based on these feedback and assessment, the most suitable method of Class Room Learning  was chosen that maximized ‘Student Engagement and effective learning.’

4.Insights

A few years back dissemination of information was seen as wow factor by most of the students.  They were both open to Theory as well as Application oriented examples. However, this Design Thinking Exercise highlighted that in todays connected era, with  Information at the finger tip of the students, dissemination of information is not seen as WOW  factor. Students were eager to apply the theory taught. There was little interest shown by the  them to do follow up theoretical assignments. However, one significant insight came out which highlighted that students love to do anything  that is real time and in connected environment. Connected environment also prompted them to  work together than work individually. Another prominent insight was that in the existing of class room learning students were never  asked how would they like to learn (besides Course Selection)? The existing model perceived students as ‘Receivers of the information’.

On the Teacher side, it was a case of Fixed Mindset. (Ref:Course video-Week 2 Story of George  and Jeffe). The focus of the teacher was on completion of the syllabus and reluctance to change  the teaching methods established a decade ago (which still worked as far as the students’ grades  were concerned) Thus the design thinking approach highlighted the gap between the delivery by the teachers and  the expectations of the students. It also gave out the design criteria for the class room learning  that will bring about greater student engagement and effective learning. These criteria were ‘Active participation of students’ (Investigative approach by teacher),’Group  Exercises’, ‘Application Oriented Teaching’, ‘Related assignments based on Real life problems’  and ‘facilitation of real time sharing’. Based on these, it was possible to arrive at different  Learning approaches that resulted into greater student engagement and effective class room  learning.

5.Appraoch

The problem at hand (Student engagement) called for qualitative techniques and it was  challenging to understand what were students expecting from the class room sessions. Hence  the tools adopted (Visualization, Mind Mapping and Learning Launch) shall stay relevant for studying such similar problems. However, if the scope of the assignment is broadened (from class room learning to overall  learning experience) then ‘Ethnography’ (especially Journey mapping’) will be a crucial additional  tool in broader studies.

