This book addresses the contributions of design thinking to higher education and explores the benefits and challenges of design thinking discourses and practices in interdisciplinary contexts. With a particular focus on Australia, the USA and UK, the book examines the value and drawbacks of employing design thinking in different disciplines and contexts, and also considers its future.
It's time to design the next iteration of higher education. There is no question that higher education faces significant challenges. Most of today's universities aren't prepared to tackle issues like demographic change, the continued defunding of public education, cost pressures, and the opportunities and challenges of educational technologies. Then, of course, there is the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, which will reverberate for years and may very well usher higher education into an era of significant structural change. Some critics argue that a premium should be placed on change functions—that is to say, on creativity, innovation, organizational learning, and change management. Yet few institutions of higher education have functions focused on thoughtful, iterative problem-solving and opportunity identification. The authors of Design for Change in Higher Education argue that we must imagine and actively make our way to new institutional forms. They assert that design—a practical art that is conceptually rich and visible in its concreteness—must become a core internal competency of the university. They propose one grounded in the practical experiences of a specific educational design organization: Michigan State University's Hub for Innovation in Learning and Technology, which all three authors have helped to run. The Hub was created to address issues of participation, impact, and scale in moving learning innovations from the individual to the collective and from the classroom to the institution. Framing each chapter around a case study of design practice in higher education, the book uses that case study as the foundation on which to build design theory for higher education. It is complemented by an online playbook featuring tactics that can be used and adapted by others interested in facilitating their own design work. Touching on learning experience design (LXD) as an increasingly critical practice, the authors also develop a constructivist view of designing conversations. A playbook that grounds theory in practice, Design for Change in Higher Education is aimed at faculty, staff, and students engaged in the important work of imagining new forms of education.
Faculty in higher education are disciplinary experts, but they seldom receive formal training in teaching. Higher Education by Design uses the principles of design thinking to bridge this gap through practical examples and step-by-step instructions based on educational theory and best practices in pedagogical and curricular development. This book offers practical advice for effective teaching and instruction, interdisciplinary curricular collaborations, writing course syllabi, creating course outcomes and objectives, planning assessments, and building curricular content. Whether you are a seasoned professor or new instructor, the strategies in this book can improve your practice as an educator.
"This book features chapters addressing they can improve student learning outcomes and students awareness of what they are learning by applying principles of design thinking into the curriculum"--
This book, by combining sociocultural, material, cognitive and embodied perspectives on human knowing, offers a new and powerful conceptualisation of epistemic fluency – a capacity that underpins knowledgeable professional action and innovation. Using results from empirical studies of professional education programs, the book sheds light on practical ways in which the development of epistemic fluency can be recognised and supported - in higher education and in the transition to work. The book provides a broader and deeper conception of epistemic fluency than previously available in the literature. Epistemic fluency involves a set of capabilities that allow people to recognize and participate in different ways of knowing. Such people are adept at combining different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge and at reconfiguring their work environment to see problems and solutions anew. In practical terms, the book addresses the following kinds of questions. What does it take to be a productive member of a multidisciplinary team working on a complex problem? What enables a person to integrate different types and fields of knowledge, indeed different ways of knowing, in order to make some well-founded decisions and take actions in the world? What personal knowledge resources are entailed in analysing a problem and describing an innovative solution, such that the innovation can be shared in an organization or professional community? How do people get better at these things; and how can teachers in higher education help students develop these valued capacities? The answers to these questions are central to a thorough understanding of what it means to become an effective knowledge worker and resourceful professional.
Acknowledging that empowering today’s learner to find innovative and enriching experiences brings about a deeper desire within them to learn and develop skills, this book showcases a combination of innovative educational practices and creative pedagogy techniques to demonstrate how educators can kick-start learning success.
School innovation expert John B. Nash demonstrates how design thinking can be adapted successfully by busy school leaders seeking student-centered solutions to a range of challenges. Based on a decade of work teaching school leaders nationally and internationally, Design Thinking in Schools shows how leaders can adopt a design thinking mindset to uncover problems and harness the ideas and energy of students and other stakeholders to create unique, effective solutions within a single semester or school year. The book is a step-by-step guide that offers critical guidance and field‐tested tools for choosing design teams, developing prototypes, and selecting promising ideas to take to scale. It includes rich examples of educators at the elementary, middle, and high school level who have used design thinking to find creative solutions for improving student engagement, school climate, and parent-teacher conferences, among many other challenges. Nash illustrates how school leaders can use the design thinking process to access a range of student voices for a diversity of opinions and feedback on topics that better inform school change. Lively and inspiring, Design Thinking in Schools is a critical resource for school leaders seeking to leverage the untapped wealth of knowledge and experience contained within their own buildings to make schools innovative places of learning.
In this book, Carrie B. Kisker illustrates how community colleges can utilize design thinking to identify and evaluate entrepreneurial opportunities, and experiment with the internal changes necessary to optimize outcomes for stakeholders. Kisker outlines a process whereby college leaders can empower faculty and staff to think creatively about how to reduce their institution's dependence on state allocations in ways that are not only consistent with the college's mission and values, but also provide the greatest likelihood for institutional and student success. The book presents evidence drawn from case studies at four community colleges along with in-depth qualitative interviews with leaders, faculty, and staff who have been involved in their institution's entrepreneurial efforts. The featured colleges--Maricopa County Community Colleges (AZ), Tarrant County College (TX), North Iowa Community College, and Valencia College (FL)--all have long histories of engaging in entrepreneurial initiatives. By telling the stories of several influential community college leaders' experiences with entrepreneurialism--using design thinking as a framework for understanding their successes and failures--Kisker provides a roadmap for colleges to move beyond their historical pattern of incremental responses to external pressures, and instead begin to innovate in a creative, mission-oriented approach.
This book analyzes the use of gamification and design thinking in higher education, examining how both techniques can be combined and used together to promote motivation, engagement, and participation among students. Using two in-depth examples, the authors show that the introduction of a gamified design in a design thinking activity can be a powerful tool to enhance the experiences of students in the teaching-learning process of a subject; motivate participants in a design thinking activity in the university environment; and enhance skills such as creativity, critical thinking and problem-solving, and collaboration, widely demanded in the labor market. Further, they examine how gamification and design thinking in the educational field can enable both the motivation and engagement of students and promote behavioral changes that materialize as a boost in learning outcomes and academic performance. Providing valuable recommendations and insights into the analysis, design and development, and implementation and evaluation of gamified design thinking activities to be carried out in higher education, as well as examining relevant ethical issues, the book will appeal to scholars, researchers, academic faculty, and educators working in the field of higher education, and with interests in educational psychology and theories of learning.
