Today’s digital students are demanding a higher quality of education and customized learning experiences. Accessibility and success depends on personal factors that extend beyond the campus. Students are looking for learning that relates directly to them. Online learning has allowed students with busy work schedules, hectic personal lives, and a lengthy list of responsibilities to continue their education. However, traditional online programs may fail to meet student needs, because they are mainly a one-size-fits-all solution. As adult learners are looking to explore career opportunities, new skills, or personal interests, their learning experience is significant. Universities that offer a student-centered design approach will engage and elevate their learners, and above all, retain those learners for the duration of the program.
As a college or university curriculum leader, you can propose tailoring the design thinking process or human-centered design process to student-centered design.

Here are five steps for student-centered design:

1. Empathy. Working with your faculty to observe and discuss students as individuals to identify key patterns and insights. The outcome is to create personas to guide design and development decisions and ideas.
2. Define. Work with faculty to establish student-centered outcomes, identify desired results of course and program studies, as well as interests and other motivators for students.
3. Ideate. Work with faculty to look beyond the usual methods of solving problems in order to find better, more elegant, and satisfying solutions to problems that affect a student’s experience.
4. Prototype. Design and build active and engaging student-centered learning activities/experiences with personalized pathways for each persona and feedback to help students do best on the assessments and achieve the best outcomes.
5. Test and Implement. We work with faculty to make initial course enhancements based on data and insights. Identify gaps in insights. Refer students to additional remediation or tutoring.  Make referrals for a new iteration.

What can you expect for your students?

With student-centered design, you can expect student-centered learner outcomes, as well as formative and summative assessments that are flexible and meaningful. Students will own their own learning and receive real time, personalized feedback based on needs, and application of content. With student-centered design, you can provide real-time data analytics to enhance instruction, empathize with student needs, and target students for immediate remediation. Personalized learning increases engagement and reduce tutoring needs among some students.

Links to Design Thinking Resources