When COVID-19 struck in March 2020, both students and faculty had to scramble to adjust to the rapidly evolving new normal.
For a highly hands-on, in-person class like Professor Dev Dutta's 'Design Thinking for Social Justice, Change, and Innovation', this proved very challenging. Professor Dutta has educator certifications from both MIT and Stanford on teaching design thinking, but those experiences had not prepared him to rapidly transfer an in-person design thinking course to an online format. In fact, given the hands-on, team-based, experimentation-oriented approach that design thinking recommends, teaching design thinking online is an oxymoron!
Professor Dutta knew he had to innovate on his pedagogy, and do so rapidly. He decided to treat this as a design thinking problem. After a few quick rounds of ideation and prototyping using a virtual collaboration app (Sprintbase) that he identified, he got certified to teach with it. Then, he rapidly ported his course and made it go fully online. Based on application of the design thinking methodology, Professor Dutta had found a "solution that works" - even during pandemic times!
