Applying Design Thinking to Improve Competency-Based Economics Curriculum

Nowadays the majority of college-going students are non-traditional students who pursue a college degree that can be relevant to their career goals while having work and family commitments. Competency-based education as an innovative educational model provides students with flexibility and allows students to master skills at their own pace through what they already know, which can result in shorter times and lower costs to graduation. While the competency-based education is gaining momentum among colleges and universities who aim to deliver a student-centered focus, a common challenge that a lot of institutions are facing is how to create learning experience that is engaging and tailored to each student’s unique needs. This challenge has become more prominent as institutions have growing number of online students in the competency-based programs with limited faculty support. Students are not satisfied with “one size fits all” course design approach as it doesn’t provide them any effective solutions to their learning needs. With the dissatisfaction with the learning experience, students are less motivated to complete the course and more intended to give up the pursuit of the degree.

In order to enhance student’s motivation and engagement in learning, the key is to create a truly student-centered learning experience that understands students’ learning needs and provides solutions to satisfy their needs. Design thinking is a design framework that is solution oriented and directs actions to create a preferred future. The main aim of it is for the design team to sort out complicated issues and emerge with innovative and appropriate solutions that will fulfill people’s needs and ultimately enhance the quality of life for people. Design thinking process consists of mainly five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Empathizing is central to the design thinking process. It allows designers to understand what the end users think and how they feel, which, in turn, helps the design team to gain empathy and insight into human behaviors. Having a solid understanding of learners’ behaviors and needs is the foundation of a good design of a curriculum. With all the insights gathered at the stage of empathizing, the design team will synthesize the information and define the problem statement. The stage of defining is critical to the design process because it helps express the problem explicitly and focused, which will help open up more avenues and applicable solutions. Ideating as the next stage is to transition from identifying problems to creating solutions. During this stage, design team brainstorms as many ideas as possible to maximize the innovation potential. At the end of the stage, the best and most applicable solutions are selected. In the stage of prototyping, solutions are brought into vision by creating drafts and samples. The full version of the solutions is tested with the end users in the last stage of testing where responses from end users are monitored and analyzed to determine if the solutions have satisfied the end users’ needs.

Western Governors University is an online institution with 80,000 students that offers competency-based programs. Early this year, a few undergraduate core courses in the College of Business were identified with highest drop rate. Under the leadership of our Vice President of Design and Development, these courses went through redevelopment by applying design thinking process. I as the Instructional Designer worked with a team that consisted of Architects, Engineers, UI/UX, and Project Manager on the redevelopment of Microeconomics. In the stage of empathizing, we as a team gathered information from the end users, our students. Data was pulled from the college portrait and course health dashboard. Student’s comments were pulled from the End of Course Survey and Student Satisfaction Survey. Based on the information we collected, we created student personas that described some of the common traits of our students. The personas showed that most of our students enrolled in the College of Business are highly driven individuals that juggle multiple responsibilities and commitments. Many of them have limited or no business experience and decide to come back to school to pursue a degree after being away from school for a long time. Creating student personas helped the design team identify and narrow down the problems students tend to experience when taking Microeconomics course. The problems we identified were centered around students feeling intimidated by the subject due to the decay of the knowledge in math and not finding the subject relevant to their daily life or job. The next stage of ideating is a divergent as well as convergent process. We first discussed many ideas that could provide solutions to the identified problems and potentially innovate the learning experience. In the end of the discussion, we sorted out all the possible solutions and selected the best that were the most applicable ones considering all the constraints we had. To help ease students’ anxiety of math, we designed reading materials on math and graphs and encouraged students to go through it at the beginning of the course. We also added videos that addressed the difficult math-related concepts. To help bridge the gap between what students have to learn and what they do on a daily basis, we designed problem practices that were based on real-world scenarios. To put the solutions into vision, we prototyped the course by designing course patterns and learning pathway that incorporated the solutions we designed.

The redeveloped Microeconomics course will be launched in July of this year. Our hypotheses on the effectiveness of the implemented solutions to our students’ needs are: 1) Students will engage more in their learning; 2) The completion rate will increase. To confirm our hypotheses, course completion rate and student retention rate from this course will be gathered and compared with the data from the previous course version. Data from Student Satisfaction Survey will also be gathered to see if students’ satisfaction with their learning experience is enhanced.

This discovery session presentation will reveal the framework of design thinking process, demonstrate how the design thinking is applied in a course development process, and discuss the implementation of learning solutions within the online competency-based education environment.  Those who will benefit from this presentation include educators in K-12 and Higher Ed institutions as well as those from all levels of expertise.  The session outcomes are as follows: 

1. Author will present the student personas, problem statements, course patterns and learning pathway as the outcomes of the design thinking process.
2. Participants will recognize the five stages of design thinking process and how they are used in a competency-based environment.
3. Participants will engage in discussions on the best practices of creating student-centered learning experience.