Frame Your Design Challenge
What is the problem you’re trying to solve?
How can we improve the online learning experience?
1) Take a stab at framing it as a design question.
How could we make online education more meaningful and more reliable?
2) Now, state the ultimate impact you’re trying to have.
I want students who get online degree would receive high-quality knowledge and skills the same as students from traditional colleges, and also improve the acceptability from the entire society or industry.
3) What are some possible solutions to your problem?
Improving the management of online education (like attendance, assignments, feedback, test); creating more helpful conversations and interactions among professors and students via technological ways; building more networking for students; providing more practical training opportunities for online students; making class content from professor more structured; motivating online students, letting them engage in the class, and make them more concentrated; building better atmosphere for studying; etc.
4) Finally, write down some of the context and constraints that you’re facing.
Because traditional face to face college experience us some hints about how to improve online education, we want to only focus on the online degree-level learning.
5) Does your original question need a tweak? Try it again.
How might degree-level online students be more competitive?
– What does your problem look like in the future?
– Start thinking about possible users.
– i think about this type of problem often: what can motivate people to value something. Designing a system that encourages increased value of non-traditional work.
Nudge theory is an interesting way to this outcome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory
Choice Architects:
http://freakonomics.com/2008/04/11/nudge/