Co-Design: An Innovation in Higher Ed That Works
The activity on campus was somewhere between flurry and frenzy: professors scurrying to pull together new approaches to courses, students asking questions about an unsure and evolving schedule, and decisions needing to be made about which programs to run and which to abandon.
Sound familiar? No, this isn’t a scene from a university dealing with COVID-19. This is a description of our recent startup university, Fulbright University Vietnam, during its inaugural year in 2018. Much like a crisis, we faced uncertainty, but in our case, we harnessed it for the sake of innovation. Everyone — students, faculty, and staff — were purposefully creating and testing new ideas to make the university better. Such an approach, which we call “co-design,” can help reframe a crisis like COVID-19 as an opportunity. As we discovered, co-design not only produces new ideas, but also an adaptive campus community able to meet disruptive moments like this one, with renewed commitment to the university’s success.
University and college leaders are currently under great pressure to answer difficult questions about an uncertain future. While one’s first instinct may be to find shelter in a familiar sense of stability, what if these questions were instead turned into topics of inquiry for students, faculty, and administrators to embrace as challenges for reworking and improving institutions? What if campus leaders were to see their roles as entrepreneurs, embracing disruption and viewing their institutions as re-startup organizations?
At Fulbright, we found that our institution’s best thinking came from the ground up. The co-design year gave students, faculty, and staff permission to collaboratively create, experiment, and develop various features of the university‘s undergraduate program. Not everything was on the table for design. Fulbright had a clear mission: it was founded as a post-war collaboration between the US and Vietnam, it was grounded in the American tradition of the liberal arts, sciences, and engineering, and it was to be adapted to Vietnamese students. Building on these principles, the co-design year pre-admitted a small cohort of students to Fulbright to work with the founding faculty and staff to develop and iterate features of the program, including: potential courses, extracurricular experiences, class schedules, student services, active learning approaches, and interdisciplinary curricular features.
The range of experimentation was wide. Some teams of faculty and students developed highly interdisciplinary and experiential courses unique to Fulbright. Others worked with traditional courses from the liberal arts to see how Vietnamese students, used to rote learning experiences in high school, could most effectively transition to seminars and discussion-based classes. Yet others developed new features in both the curriculum and co-curriculum, for example establishing a format for experiential, off-campus learning and embedded career development support starting in the first year.
Though experimental, the co-design year was highly structured. There was a common schedule and a time limit for teams to do their work. There were frequent community-wide “read outs” where teams presented their ideas and findings. Activities were guided by well-known industry practices of design thinking. And there were many meetings with faculty, staff and leadership to work to bring the design pieces together into a coherent whole. That’s not to say that the year was without challenges; we worked hard to remain focused on the learning and continued to pinpoint the value that both individuals and the institutions derived from this process.
The co-design approach is adaptable for institutions facing their own questions in the face of COVID-19. Southern New Hampshire University, for example, recently announced a reduction in tuition and is providing students with full scholarships this year as faculty and staff work to reimagine new pathways for student degrees. A more incremental approach to co-design might look like this: instead of mandating a one-size-fits-all course structure, an institution could ask different professors and departments to pilot various approaches to teaching throughout the fall. During frequent reflection points scheduled throughout the term, leaders could then gather feedback from faculty and students on successes and challenges. Where possible, students could be put in small teams empowered to design pandemic-responsive courses and student services with faculty support. Most important for today’s context: these activities can happen online or in-person.
Because its approach is fundamentally ground-up, co-design can be disorienting to leaders who are used to top-down decision making. Leadership in co-design is not about giving directives, but supporting stakeholders in asking questions. Leaders can hold team meetings to synthesize ideas, readjust schedules to accommodate new approaches, ensure cross-communication between initiatives, and confirm alignment of ideas with the institution’s mission and values. Through co-design, any decisions that leaders must ultimately make are already primed for community adoption.
Despite the potential for messiness, uncertainty, and disorientation, a co-design approach is well worth it. At Fulbright, we found that the co-design year led to genuinely new and interesting ideas that improved the institution. It also reinforced valuable traditions (e.g. the liberal arts) and gave faculty and students a deeper understanding of their purpose. But its most significant benefit was in creating a community deeply and directly invested in the university’s success. As leaders, we rarely heard a problem in the co-design year that didn’t already have individuals (primarily students!) working on solutions. The problem-solving culture that grew out of the co-design year made Fulbright a more resilient and adaptable institution, prepared for an evolving future.
As leaders dealing with COVID-19 and the many disruptions facing higher education, co-design offers a way of boldly taking on challenges, generating new ideas, tapping into community energies, and building a more resilient institutional culture. By opening up key questions to students, faculty, and staff for experimentation, one gets both new ideas and deeper community commitment. This approach can help institutions not only deal with an acute crisis, but make them stronger, better, and more adaptable for the future.
Author Bios:
Ryan Derby-Talbot PhD served as Fulbright University Vietnam’s founding Chief Academic Officer. A mathematician and educator, he has taught and held academic leadership positions in Japan, Egypt and Canada. He is the founder of the organization Reimagining Higher Ed.
Andrew Maguire served as Fulbright University Vietnam’s Director of Strategy and Special Projects during his tenure as a Luce Scholar in Vietnam. He is currently writing his first book through New Degree Press, titled Hidden Curriculum, which explores the role of youth development organizations in helping student overcome unstated barriers in their education.
