Design Journal Series: Week 3

Class: Feb 21, 2020

[As part of my design thinking class at the Harvard Graduate School of Education this Spring, I’m exploring how edtech experiences are designed and tested, with the help of a great bunch of classmates, instructors and ex-colleagues (who I debrief with first thing after class!). I’m starting this series of weekly design journal- where I hope to list down my assumptions, thoughts and post testing reflections.]

For this class we built a prototype for an online learning module. And tested it with our classmates. We also had a fabulous guest speaker from Harvard Division of Continuing Education, who designs blended learning experiences through online courses, interactive digital simulations etc.

It was nice to see how online education can be designed to foster interaction. There are so many creative ways of running interactive workshops just using Zoom. If you want multiple group activity in your online session, just create separate meeting rooms- share it with them, and debrief when they’re back. You can also arrange for online live brainstorming platforms, using virtual drawing boards and stickies etc. It was also nice to learn how HarvardX online students can also interact with offline students, during class.

Here’s the online course I built, as part of a Tufts course I actually plan to teach next semester, on Designing for Social Innovation, that merges design thinking, behavioral change and social innovation. I am thinking of building a prototyping plan for this. My classmate David Reiff and former colleagues Shafqat and Shazzad bhai offered to help (yayy)!

Next I’m building a simulation prototype to test in class! Can’t wait for another design failure -_-