Planning and Teaching Design Thinking Online

Although design thinking for innovation has been in practice for a long time, design thinking for social entrepreneurship is gaining immense popularity in recent years. The rapid advancements in technology have been a contributor to such demand. There is considerable literature related to design thinking available through resources online. However most of it focuses on conducting the course in an offline mode. Although online student engagement has considerably improved due to the prevailing pandemic, conducting group based activities nevertheless remains a challenge to any teacher. Traditional classroom learning fosters creative engagement by teamwork. However, in an online setup, promoting an entrepreneurial mindset is a different ball game. It would require a huge effort on the part of a teacher to bring collaboration and innovation on board, given the resources and different mindsets of learners. Efforts in planning and delivering a design thinking course online, incorporating team building strategies and online tools for delivery and assessment are highlighted in this work. The course is conducted on MS Teams and is offered to semester three under graduate students across all disciplines as a part of our curriculum. Tools like slack, Trello are used for collaboration and communication. Happiness-Index (HI) metrics are developed to continuously measure the efficacy of the proposed methodology and the Anti-Air Teamwork Observation Measure (ATOM) model is used to measure the overall ratings of the team’s performance, the obvious outcome of the method being how seamlessly it leads to innovations.