Introduction to Design Thinking

The first step of the design thinking process is to empathise with our target groups, i.e. university teachers, decision makers and support staff. To understand what they desire or feel, we have to engage with them, one simple way of which is to conduct special surveys. In order to gather further crucial information and discover the subtle details of every-day stories, we should schedule one-on-one interviews with as many target group representatives as possible, as that can help us deliver tailor-made EduHackathons and find out responses to various real-life situations.

Toolbox - empathise process

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Combine research findings and survey results and articulate where the most crucial problems are.

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Generate a vast range of uncensored creative ideas (even if they sound crazy or silly).

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Build real, tangible artefacts (e.g. an OER or a strategy draft) to address some of the ideas selected from the brainstorming stage.

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Get feedback from an extended group of users, representing the same viewpoints and needs as the event participants. Rank and evaluate the proposed solutions and select the winners.

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Introduce the strongest, best elaborated and most highly rated outcomes of the hackathon to the participants’ institution’s practice. Let them run for a while outside of the testbed in real life and come back to evaluate and fine-tune them.