U101: The Design Thinking Blog

Interactive Design Institute

It looks like we have competition!  Interesting the 'world-wide' spin they've put on it. 

"Mixing the philosophy of the Open University with the principles of an internet chat room, Scotland's most unlikely seat of learning - based in a Midlothian farmyard - has established itself as Britain's only online provider of art and design degrees.  Exactly a year since it began offering degree courses, the Interactive Design Institute at Pathhead, near Edinburgh, has revealed that it has enrolled more than 300 students from 37 countries. Students from Iran, China and Hungary have taken up a selection of courses that offer qualifications in art and design without the need for temporary visas."

Interactive Design Institute

SCAD e-learning

Did you know that SCAD - Savannah College of Art and Design has a Design e-learning degree program? It seems to run in parallel to the onside program.

Here is a link to a promotional video.
http://www.scadelearning.org/about/videos.cfm#

or read more about:
http://www.scadelearning.org/about/community.cfm

Interestingly, they do not say anything in particular about the learning needs in design. The resources they use are standard in e-learning. While watching this, I wondered if we need to highlight in the promotion of U101 much more the experimental nature of our course.

At The Programme Level

The new course in Design Thinking forms the first part of a spine for a programme in Design, the idea being that other courses that the student selects completes the specialisation into one area or another (at present: urban and regional environments, health, culture & media, sport, business). At at a presentation to the Technologies programme committee last Friday the comment was made that although the Design Thinking course sounds great, the danger is that the students then go on to do other courses without a lot of design content, and end up becoming disillusioned.

This is a genuine problem, since we are at present not able to manage students as a cohort. Essentially we would be giving them the tools in Design Thinking to make their own connections, and then leaving it up to them for the rest of the time.

What are the solutions? How might it be possible to manage students as a cohort? Perhaps having an 'empty' course at second and third level with which to develop their design portfolio might be an idea. We certainly need to have something that binds the design students together, and gives them a sense of collective identity. And not least having a decent portfolio of work for when they graduate.