Design Thinking in Designing Academic Curriculum – Visualization

Challenge

Being a management student at a premier B School in India, I have to go through intense rigour of  completing pre-class assignments, readings, submissions, quizzes, assignments, projects, mid-term  and end-term exams, let alone non-academic events and activities. At times, for the sake of meeting  deadlines, submissions are done without a comprehensive grasp and understanding of the issue or  the subject at hand. Regardless of the grades received, there is always an uneasiness about the control  on the subject, and it perturbed me a lot. Expecting that all the students have gone through the pre- read assignments and readings, the professors did not start from the basics, thus further compounding  the issue and uneasiness. We used to get lost in the trees, not knowing the extent of the woods.

I felt that there was a need to re-design and re-orient the course curriculum in a way that the students  receive a visual representation of the same, making it not only more effective but also time-efficient.  I, along with my friends, too a test-subject, an existing course, and realigned the same as per the  principles of Design Thinking.

The Tool

Take for instance the subject of Corporate Finance or Financial Management. An organization faces a  numerous issues when it comes of Financial Management, but, during the course, we were not able  to fit all the understanding of those issues into bigger scheme of things. This is where the Visualization  tool came to our rescue. It helped us to re-orient the course curriculum of Financial Management in a  way that we had a better grasp of the issue and how to navigate through those “trees’, while still  keeping the extent of “woods”, at the back of our head.

Application

We created various categories, or, as we used to call them, baskets, for each and every topic in the  course of Financial Management. Then we not only identified the common threads, linking those  baskets, but also the sequence of those threads in that network.

For instance, take the issues of “stock buyback” and “dividend pay-out” faced by any publicly listed  organization. We were taught there two issues separately in the Financial Management class, without  knowing that they come under the broad umbrella of “problem of excess cash reserve”, which further  came under the umbrella of “distribution of funds”. Through a network of “common threads” (paying  money back, in this case), we were able to eliminate or merge these fragmented baskets and were  able to conceptualize the entire Corporate Finance as Raising of Funds, Investing of Funds and Paying  Back of funds. This simple visualization helped many a student, fresh off the undergraduate college to  understand the elusive corporate finance as nothing but the aforementioned three simple decisions,  with sub-categories in them.

Insight and Approach

I think Design Thinking helped me “restructure” the problem at hand in a way that the issue is  addressed from the most fundamental level; it made me think from the most elemental aspects and  employ a bottom-up approach to the problem, something which I was missing earlier. As far the  challenge, is concerned, it is no longer a challenge anymore.

The applicability of Design Thinking cuts wide areas, and I could not have thought that it could be  applied even to re-design or re-orient an academic course curriculum. I am looking forward to use this  experience and apply the same to other courses as well, even recommending the faculty members  about it positive reception among the students, thus bridging the learning gap we all were facing.

