Abstract
Design thinking strategies are used to engage stakeholders to define a problem, inspire creativity in solution designs, prototype, iterate together, and implement solutions that reflect the community for which they were designed. Increasingly, these strategies are being used within student success and innovation work in higher education. The primary purpose of this chapter is to explore the importance of the “prototype” phase of the design thinking process when applied to designing co-curricular experiences through a case study of an institution that utilized design thinking and service improvement frameworks to design an academic and career advising system to best serve students.
TopIntroduction
Making a major change on a college or university campus is a daunting task. However, when faced with large-scale problems, small, incremental changes can be problematic, and are often not enough to achieve desired outcomes. So, what is a campus to do when they need to improve student success and retention? As others have noted (Martin, 2017), we know what works, we just have difficulty scaling up to a campus-wide implementation.
When challenged with creating specific and focused plans to improve retention, a large urban public university identified academic advising as one area where improvements could have a significant impact on student outcomes. While the institution had grown its academic advising staff significantly over the past 10 years, it needed to better coordinate advising systems to improve both the student and advisor experience. With the support of university leadership, a team of current advisors and staff (“the workgroup”) spent nine months envisioning a revitalized academic and career advising system through a theoretical framework of student retention and a specific design process. The process was intentional, iterative, and engaged the entire campus community—most importantly its students.
Engagement of students in problem posing, as well as solution generation, is meant to enhance their sense of agency in their education as well as their learning. Through the process of academic and career advising redesign, advisors were trained as designers—using design thinking strategies alongside students—to redesign the advising system. We offer our guiding frameworks (service, retention, and design), discuss students as stakeholders and their role in both prototyping and redesign of advising, and share how prototyping solutions with student involvement resulted in an advising system that allows students to connect their co-curricular learning to their academic and career goals. Relatedly, this chapter also examines the role of academic and career advising as delivery of co-curricular learning. Academic advisors can be positioned to foster the improvement of learning outcomes for students when providing holistic advising in an environment that supports student exploration and critical thinking.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Advising: Providing guidance to another based on one’s area of expertise or experience.
Practitioner: One who is actively engaged in a discipline or profession.
Service Improvement: A concept from Total Quality Management which focused on constantly scanning the experience of the user for opportunities to improve their experiences.
Retention: To keep or maintain, for a students to continue matriculating from year to year.
Use Case: A specific situation for which a product or service could be potentially useful.
Employee Engagement: The extent to which an employee experiences satisfaction with their job and expresses this satisfaction through contributions to the organization’s goals and objectives.