Reinventing Ourselves: Methods and techniques for designing new programs that foster innovation and creative design

In 2016, the Institute of Transformational Learning at University of Texas System partnered with the UT Health School of Public Health  to reinvent their graduate programs. Through a series of workshops, over 85 faculty across 6 departments reinvented their core curricula and created a unique online model for graduate students to expand access to public health programs across many industry sectors and future job opportunities..

The Institute for Transformational Learning was established by the University of Texas Board of Regents in 2012 as a financially sustainable catalyst for innovation. The Institute for Transformational Learning’s mandate is to support U.T. System campuses as they design, test, and scale innovative educational models that will make a UT quality education more accessible, affordable, and successful in knowledge and workforce domains that are critical to Texas and the nation.

UT Health’s School of Public Health approached the Institute for Transformational Learning in a moment when accreditation standards were changing. Seeking to seize the moment, the leadership hoped to not only meet the new competency standards, but to reimagine their programs in a way that spoke directly to students interested in graduate level studies in Public Health.

Public Health is a complex educational space with five core disciplines: Behavioral science/health education; Biostatistics; Environmental health; Epidemiology; and Health services administration. This diverse collection of disciplines brings with it a diverse student population, such as practicing physicians, aspiring public health educations, and epidemiologists seeking the latest biostat data approaches to addressing complex disease outbreaks.

The faculty recognized that traditional public health programs were topically focused and not always relevant to the needs of practitioners. They sought to reimagine their work with a student centric lens. In their vision, future Master’s of Public Health students would experience an online, rich learning experience that exposed them to the core of public health competencies, while allowing them as much time as possible in their areas of specializations.

This transformation was managed through a series of workshops and work efforts in the Summer and Fall of 2017.  Using a design thinking approach, the faculty worked to deconstruct the traditional models, analyze and align with the needs of real public health practitioners, and reinvent their learning experiences.

Through this exercise, the faculty were able to think through a program design and apply a variety of contextual lenses to a learning experience in public health.  This allowed them to design purposeful and thoughtfully designed stackable certificates, that would appeal directly to the diverse educational goals of students of public health.

Along the way, the faculty were able to identify unique, design thinking approaches to learning that aligned with industry competency standards and created opportunities for unique industry partnerships.

The newly created online programs will be offered through the innovative TEx platform, a learner centric environment committed to the support and nurturing of online students.

In this educational session, we will:

• Share the process and lessons learned from this diverse and geographically dispersed faculty

• Understand the use of design based thinking to create student-focused experiences

• Examine ways to invite industry and community partners into the program design process

• Explore ways to re-envision core curricula

• Discuss models for stackable certificates to meet the needs of next generation learners

The target audience for this session is design thinkers, administrators, faculty and instructional designers.