Design Thinking as an Instructional Design Approach - Leaders of Online Learning
This article is the first one in a series of articles in which I will deconstruct a recent course I worked on with Bosnia and Herzegovina Futures Foundation. ''Leaders of Online Learning'' is now live, upskilling educators across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. In this article, I will demonstrate how I used design thinking as a framework for the design of this course. I haven't done this before, so I'm hoping to get some constructive feedback from those reading the article.
What is Design Thinking?
In a nutshell, design thinking is a human- centered, iterative process that companies use to solve problems and develop products and services. It puts the end user at the center of attention and is very much data-driven. There are five stages in the design thinking process: empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing.
1. EMPATHIZING
The first stage revolves around understanding the end user's situation. Who are your end users? What roles are they in? What are their challenges? Their biggest pain points? To learn more about our target audience, we put together a survey and sent it out to educational institutions across Bosnia and Herzegovina. About 360 teachers responded.
What's interesting is that the development of this survey went through its own iterative process. We wrote the questions, tested the survey internally, adjusted the questions, then tested the survey again with a small number of teachers, and modified the questions one last time. About 30 to 40% of the questions changed in that process, enabling us to get better data.
2. DEFINING
At this stage, we analyzed the survey results and based on the results, defined the problem(s): "The vast majority of teachers are unsure how to plan for interactive online classes, have major challenges in assessing learning online, and many have no adequate access to or sufficient knowledge about all the tools and learning management systems available out there." We also developed two personas:
Persona 1: representing teachers with a very low level of digital literacy, who typically used Viber and WhatsApp for distance learning.
Persona 2: representing teachers with a medium or high level of digital literacy, who were using Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams in addition to a few other applications for instruction.
So, we had to design for both tech-challenged and tech-savvy teachers because both groups needed help with choosing the pedagogical approaches that best fit the online environment.
3. IDEATING
This is the most fun stage of all because you just throw all possible ideas around. To tackle the above-stated problems, we thought about webinars, online workshops, courses, localized teacher-support hubs, an online community, podcasts, and even launching a TV show. Seriously, why isn't there a fun TV show with an ex-teacher as a host?
But then we chose a free online course because it was the only scalable, cost-effective and high-impact solution, which could reach thousands of teachers and have them up and running before September.
4. PROTOTYPING
Prototyping is an important step in design thinking, which consists of quickly putting together a first version of the product (in our case, the course) and testing it with end users. It typically doesn't look very good nor does it have all the functionality, but it does the job of giving the users an idea of what the final product will look like.
Our prototype was a storyboard, and even though we intended to run it by the teachers, it came out during the end of the school year, when the teachers were busy finalizing the grades, and we couldn't find anyone who was free. So, we moved into the development.
5. TESTING
After developing a decent version of the course, we took ten days to test it with 15 educators across the country. They were mostly teachers and professors, but we also had those with a background in pedagogy (2), and one high school systems administrator. To prevent the inconsistency in feedback received (lessons learnt from piloting the needs assessment survey), we designed a survey again, with specific questions about the experience taking the course and space to write comments.
There was LOTS and LOTS of good feedback, including:
"The activities are not practical /challenging enough"
"The characters are creepy -change them"
"Offer issuing certificates in English, some of us wish to work abroad"
(unanimously) "We want a facilitated course, not self-paced" etc.
So, we went back and made a lot of good changes. I discovered something very interesting in the process. With my previous courses, I would build them and launch hoping and praying that people would find them useful. They were based on needs analyses, yes, but never had I “tested” a course with learners before launching it.
This time around, I know, I am 100% confident, I can feel it in my heart that this learning experience is going to be life-changing for everyone participating.
Thank you for reading! Follow the hashtag #MersiLXD on LinkedIn to easily find upcoming articles about this course, relating to neuroscience, scenario-based learning and gamification.