Review: Learning Design Thinking with IDEOU
About nine months ago I wrote about my experience working through the “Creative Leadership” certificate with IDEOU. From that article I’m going to copy and share my “why IDEOU” before going into why I wanted to learn Design Thinking, how the course was different, what I got out of it, and who I’d recommend it to!
Why IDEOU?
How did I come upon IDEOU when there are approximately 286183736718 other professional development courses out there? Well, first, I knew I wanted online only. While I fully believe an in-person learning experience is better for most people including me, online just suits my lifestyle right now. The courses are 5 weeks each (so 5 weeks x 3 for the whole certificate) at a few hours each week, so that suited my busy schedule too. I’m always skeptical of WHO is offering a course, who’s instructing, and what their credibility is, and IDEOU is a branch of the renowned design thinking agency IDEO, a name I trust to deliver quality work. On that note, I loved that everything they teach has roots in design thinking, an area I have no experience in but wanted to learn in a way that was easily applicable to my work as non-designer. As expected, a design thinking perspective on my work has fundamentally changed how I think about business.
Why Design Thinking?
I know it’s one of those buzzwords that was trendy for a bit and tossed around among creatives, marketers, and beyond, but since I had any awareness of what it is, I knew this: design thinking is a process of working that seems useful and smart for ANY department in ANY industry if you’re seeking ANY solutions or new ideas.
Course Format + Content
I think course is a strong word, this is a 90 minute session, assuming you do it all at once (you should). 90 minutes, to me, is more of a workshop. The format, in true IDEOU fashion, is really engaging, with short videos, then activities that you submit along the way, weaving in real examples and case studies of innovative IDEO client projects. I really liked the activities because they gave really good examples of a “problem” you can practice on so you don’t have to do the work of coming up with your own project to work on through the activities. That being said, maybe you DO want to design think through your own real current problem, and you’d have to do that on paper rather than in your course submissions.
Cohort vs Self-paced: 2 Types of Learning with IDEOU
IDEOU courses are split into two learning types: “cohort courses” (what I did last time) versus “self-paced” (this course). As you may be able to guess, cohort means you’re studying as a group, starting on the same date, engaging each other in different ways during the course, finishing around the same date (though you do have extended access if you don’t finish on time). Self-paced means you can start any time, no group, independent study. Being a social person, I know how beneficial it is for applied learning, to discuss and engage with others studying alongside me… and as I mentioned in my last article, IDEOU has multiple ways we connect remotely, from across the globe, during the course (it was my favourite part). So while this self-paced course is more accessible and flexible (for 90 days), I much prefer the cohort based way of learning.
Course Key Takeaways
Quite simply, the key takeaways are the four sections of the course:
gather, generate, make, share. Design thinking actually goes a bit beyond these 4 parts of the cycle, but these are the main components.
- In gather, you’re pushed to really think through the problem at hand;
- In generate, you’re learning divergent + convergent thinking;
- In make, you’re learning the value of prototyping; and
- In share, you’re learning how to pitch your solution.
Who Should Take This Course
For true Design Thinking newbies who really haven’t been exposed to these methods at all and need a brief intro, this is perfect. And for what it is, I’d recommend learning through IDEOU v.s. similar competitor’s online design thinking workshops, simply because I really believe IDEOU understands how to make online learning engaging more than many online learning options on there.
For those who want to really learn and practice design thinking, I’d suggest a longer form course, which unfortunately IDEOU doesn’t do a cohort-based long version of this intro to Design Thinking.
What they do offer are the courses (5 weeks long):
And the certificates (2–3 months long):
