The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, otherwise known as the d.school at Stanford University, is an interdisciplinary program where graduate students from across Stanford learn to become innovators by tackling big challenges together.
To help encourage innovation and spread design thinking around the world, the d.school recently launched a prototype Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking which allows you to learn design thinking methodologies and sample what the d.school has to offer.
The crash course aims to help people to grow their own capacity to innovate, to experience a different way of working, encourage collaboration, a chance to do hands-on prototyping, and most importantly, help participants apply design thinking to their work and creative projects immediately after they complete the course.
Take the Crash Course
The Crash Course in Design Thinking has three parts:
- The Gear Up! Section lists the instructions required for the course.
- Go For a Ride! features the crash course video.
- The Chart a New Course section challenges you to apply your new-found learning to your work and creative projects.
We’re proud to say that the d.school chose VideoPress as a natural fit to display the video on the crash course site.
“VideoPress helped us easily get our videos up and running on our WordPress site with minimal effort in a short amount of time,” says Bruce Boyd, the d.school’s Director of Technology.
Open source heat map connects participants worldwide
The project offers an amazing open source heat map that has helped create a social connection among people doing the crash course around the world. When you click on the Crash Course video, you can select whether you want “check it out,” or “run a crash course.” If you say that you’re running a crash course, you’ll be asked for your name, email address, and the number of people taking the crash course. This information gets placed on a heat map where the size of the dots corresponds to the size of the group. Within 24 hours of launch, the reach of the virtual crash course extended across eight countries, which included a 400 person workshop in Perm, Russia.
This virtual creative learning experience was built to help scale the Design Thinking Bootcamp that’s also featured in the d.school’s Executive Education program. With a very lean team trying to accommodate a high demand for training in Design Thinking, Jeremy Utley (Director of Executive Education) and Scott Doorley (Creative Director of the d.school) developed an initial prototype of the video. Within a few months, and with a lot of aid from partners all over the world, a simple video turned into a plug-and-play virtual course, delivered to the world for free. As of this month, there have been close to 1500 participants, across 22 countries.
Go for a test drive: visit the Virtual Crash Course page.
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