Author: Xiqiao Zhou

After defining my design challenge, I interviewed two people and wanted to hear some voice about online education.

Some response from Anthony, a start-up CEO based on NYC:

Anthony is a “traditional” man. His attitude to online education is not very positive. He said he would not hiring students from online college. The reason is it is hard to evaluate students from online learning. He pointed out that even we can see the students’ achievements via portfolio, it is not clear that what kind of education experience they had. After talking to him on this topic a while, he said he would like to accept students from the online school which have some successful alumnus. This remind me reputation of the school also play a important role when students going into the society. Comparing with the traditional schools, online learning is a new thing. It takes time to improve, and let society and industries know about them.

Some response from Nancy, a professor of a university at NJ also woking for an online college:

Nancy is teaching on a online course every week so she is very open to this. She thinks online learning experience provides a good way to improve students’ self-learning skills. Because Every thing go through on class will be show on the online classroom platform so that students can easily get access to all resources and figure out questions by themselves. But this also becomes the problem of online learning, lack of communication. Not too much interaction between students and teachers let Nancy sometimes doest know students very well. Also there is not much conversation among students.

So at this point I think my project would build the bridge between students and teachers to enhance the communication for online situation.

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?