Why design?

The most interesting activities as an educational advisor was to work in project in which a complete new curriculum has te be developed. Or a taskforce in which we had to formulate a set of quality criteria to be realized. Ans of course also when I have to develop a new course to be organized for university teachers.
In these activities the focus was on the something new for which there were no standard solutions. However there were always strong opinions by the participants what should be done. Also by me. The discussions and development activities which followed were rather interesting. You were forced to explain what we mean and we had to think creativity and consider the situation in the faculties.

Less interesting activities were projects where your ‘excellent’ suggestions were neglected and in my opinion applied wrongly. Or the ideas were excellent but the changes in the daily teaching and learning situations were small. Except by a few very motivated teachers.  This last remark is crucial, because it proves the ideas could be implemented.

Why are technical innovations using research results easily implemented and results of educational research and educational innovation in higher education are implemented slowly and not systematically? Of course educational innovations introduce all kind of difficult change processes. For me the interesting element was the concept of Design.

The question is how can you apply the concept design in education innovation? Why is the design concept not already introduced in educational innovation? I found several clues:

• Tony earl had already described in his book art and craft of course design how he designed. Some people like the book very much, other people did not like his approach.
• Reigeluth focus in his book … on design.
• The didactical design of many MOOCs are considered not optimal. Only a small group of participants will finish the MOOC. MOOC-experts stress the importance that these problems have to be studied from the perspective of design.
• The approach proposed by …. contains the step Make a prototype. Typically a concept out of the design discipline.
• The design approach of people like van A.

I still missed what design really could mean for educational innovation.

Design is already for may years a very important element of the Technical Universities. The TU Delft has published recently an interesting book about Design and also organized a MOOC about this subject. In the book en the mooc enough input was given, to be able to apply the design approach in the educational innovation. The results of this exercise you can find in this book.