Center for Academic Innovation

Context and Client Problem Statement

Key Insights

1. The coordinator is at the center of the workflow and has many responsibilities leading to the break down of communication and the redundancy of several processes.

2. Students’ ability to navigate ambiguity in tasks or deal with power dynamics in a workplace varies based on different levels of students’ professional experiences and backgrounds.

3. Manual and redundant processes are causing bottlenecks in the program’s workflow. They are also not scalable.

4. The alignment of the residency program’s learning goals and student expectations is not clearly articulated leading to a mismatch with student expectations. It should be clearly articulated that the tasks in the residency program are meant to paint a realistic picture of being a learning experience designer.

Final Recommendations

1. Implement mentorship system

   The implementation of a mentorship program aims at improving and encouraging student engagement by providing students with much needed support, by circumventing communication inefficiencies, and by simplifying the coordination process.

   By working with mentors, students have a place to go to elicit help for difficulties they are experiencing at an individual level—areas might not be well covered-by or suited- for seminar. This includes the refinement of their personal processes and methodology towards designing learning experiences and the deliverables that this entails, however, this can also include working on developing the “intangibles”: the soft-skills required to be a successful learning experience designer and the navigation of the ambiguity and openness inherent to this field of work.

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   Context: this was a recommendation I arrived at during the individual processing time within a larger group brainstorming session, so, for this recommendation, I am able to and will talk about my personal thought processes.

   When I looked at the key findings, I was trying to find a way to piece everything together, and I realized that the four findings could further be distilled into:

   1. Both the overburdening of the coordinator and the redundancies of the system were due to the centrality of the coordinator within most processes

   2. Student dissatisfation and lack engagment was mainly due to uncertainty: students were not properly made aware of the value in the more menial projects, and, with the larger higher impact projects, students experienced difficulties navigating the ambiguity inherent to the designing of learning experiences

   This lead me to look for a holistic solution that would better support students while/by unburdening the coordinator and steamlining the communicaiton & coordination processes.
   
   See my notepad and thought process in the brainstorming section.

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2. Delegation, automation, and simplification.

   The current program-coordination process and student-project management process, is almost entirely done by hand. Due to the programs rapid expansion and continued projected expansion, this model is no longer sustainable, and it is therefore essential to redistribute responsibilities and automate or simplify (cull) redundant processes and tasks.

3. Improve Student and Learning Experience Designer (LxD) Experience

   The management of the program is focused on the growth, development, and maturation of the program. This, however, was seen as synonymous with providing a well designed learning and teaching experience for students and LxDs respectively, leading to misdirected efforts. To better engage students in their learning and support LxDs in their training of students, it is vital to realign the program’s focus onto the experience of the students and LxDs.

4. Using Google Calendar to visualize student-project mapping

   In order to account for the interests and background of the students, the program conducts the pairing of students to LxDes projects by hand. There is, however, no set process or designated artefacts to help, which has resulted in a highly inefficient, inconsistent, and “chaotic” process.

   Since a large portion of the pairing process is in the balancing of schedules, the utilization and “hacking” of Google’s Calendar provides a short-term (not scalable) fix that streamlines and automates much of the process.

Client Feedback

Research

Synthesis

We analyzed the qualitative data through affinity diagramming and workflow & system modeling

Ideation & Evaluation

Brainstorming

I’m a bit of a verbal thinker, even when ideating 😅

Altogether, our team held three separate brainstorming sessions that were split between individual and group brainstorming, during which ideas would often be combined into proto-solutions.

After we had generated 50 proto-solutions, we compiled them into a spreadsheet and rated and ranked each based on its ease-of-implementation, the importance of problem(s) it aimed address, and the likely extent to which it solves these problems.