The demand for online learning worldwide has never been higher. As online learning offerings scale at an unprecedented pace, so do the complex problems inherent in any formal learning context: student motivation, completion, retention, cost, rigor, diversity, upskilling educators who learned to teach by observing their teachers, and inadequate campus infrastructure are just a small handful of the issues facing global online learning educators.
Like online learning, interest in design thinking in education is at its peak across K-12, colleges, and universities and so is the seesawing mythology surrounding the problem-solving method. Contrary to popular belief, design thinking is not easy to use, nor is it a panacea or a silver bullet. It is also not a "boondoggle: and nor is it useless in education, as was recently described by an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
As a community, we must together find ways to accelerate online learning by addressing these problems in innovative and rigorous ways. This session will contribute to the field of online learning by helping educators approach extraordinarily difficult online learning problems using design thinking as an established, creative problem-solving strategy.
Purpose
The purpose of this workshop is to provide the audience an opportunity to expand their understanding of design thinking from an expert in the method, confront three hazards new learners of design thinking face, and increase their skills in creative problem solving of their own wicked problems in online learning by building a rapid prototype during hands-on simulation of design thinking.
In this 45-minute mini-workshop, learning expert Dr. Julie Schell will introduce the topic and nature of wicked problems in online learning and lead participants through simulations of design thinking as a promising method for creating breakthrough solutions. Schell will share assessment data demonstrating the impact of using a design thinking approach to tackle her own problem of student motivation in a self-paced, asynchronous online course.
Learning Outcomes
After the workshop, participants will be able to:
- Employ the wicked problem framework to explore common and complex problems in online learning from new angles
- Self-direct further learning of design thinking as an innovative approach to solving their own pressing online learning problems
- Build a prototype to unlock potential innovative solutions to online learning problems they are currently facing in their practice
- Develop readiness to navigate three common hazards of design thinking: 1) a lack of definitional clarity around what design thinking actually is; 2) vacillating opinion about design thinking and its place in education, and 3) the lack of affordable and high-quality design thinking learning experiences.
Interactivity
The facilitator is an experienced OLC speaker and an experiential learning expert. The workshop will involve less than 7 minutes of lecture total and will include hands-on activities that they author has prototyped, piloted, and refined over the past year. Participants will talk to each other, draw/sketch, and build rapid 3-D paper prototypes, and share those prototypes in the learning community we build together. The result will be rapid yet viable solutions for problems that online learning educators are currently facing.