Portfolio - Nimesh Mohanakrishnan

Intro - The Start of the Journey:

In the first week of the UIF program, I learned the importance of connecting with people around me who fought against the status quo to drive change in the higher education system.

I connected with my seniors at college, who, at the time, were already established fellows. I learned about our college ecosystem's existing gaps and challenges and how my seniors tried to solve various issues. The interactions and productive conversations I developed with my seniors spiked my desire to work as a change agent on my campus.

My learnings about the existing problems:

From my conversations with the already-established fellows, I learned the following about my campus:

First-year student problems

Students often struggle to find clubs and communities of interest because of the lack of information. Most first-year students want mentors(seniors) who can guide them, but they take plenty of time to find suitable ones.

Problems educators expressed

Educators try to make the classroom learning experience as good as possible but fail to do so because of students' declining interest in classrooms.

Learning experiences of students

The student body collectively opinionates that they need new forms/methods of teaching within the classrooms because the traditional one-sided education isn't appealing to them.

These problems were observed by our seniors, and this information was a great starting point for us to learn about various problems before solving one.

The Research begins:

While overwhelmed with the information I received from the seniors, I needed to validate them and learn more. Therefore, I conducted tea-table talks and short informal interviews with the student body of my campus to understand if the problems still existed and if there were any new issues they faced.

I followed the following seven golden rules for conducting the interviews:
(I learned these rules from the resources shared during the program)

Start the interview/discussion with an introduction from both parties -This will help establish a connection.
Take mental snapshots or, if possible, notes - Capture on paper the person's own words. You will be interviewing in groups, so ideally, one to two of you are taking notes while the rest are engaging in the conversation.
Connect with the person you are interviewing - It's essential to show that we are listening to what the person is saying (i.e., looking at the person, not just notes). It will help us with the follow-up questions, especially if the interviewee reveals something interesting. Following up on interesting answers will make the interview feel more like a conversation.
Ask open-ended, non-leading questions - "What do you think about course X?" is a better question than "Don't you think course X is great?" The former doesn't imply there is a correct answer.
Be curious and ask "why" often - Many answers will surprise you. A good way of doing this, in addition to asking "Why?" is to say, "Tell me more about that."
Ask for stories about concrete events - Instead of asking people how they "usually" do things or how they "usually" feel, ask them about the last time they did something or the most memorable moment.
Don't be afraid of silence - Resist the need to ask another question when there is a pause. The interviewee might reflect on what they have just said and say something more profound.

I prepared the following questions before engaging in the interview process:

By asking the above questions, I captured the students' motives, challenges, problems, and behavior toward the courses taught in the education ecosystem, all of which were necessary for creating new solutions.

After the interviews, I unloaded the information from the notes in brief points onto digital sticky notes. The data collected was abstract, and hence we had to segregate it. The below information hides the personal data of the participants.

Our Observations:

Educators strive to utilize new methods to teach students, but the new methods they adopt aren't creating a change in classroom environments.

Students feel that the classes are too theoretical, and the concept of practicality is often dismissed.

Synthesizing Information:

We choose the information given by interviewee five as the basis for ideating solutions.

Note: We did not ignore information collated from other interviewees' interviews. We selected information shared by interviewee five as a basis to synthesize the information.

We spoke to Wonder Woman, a first-year Information Science student passionate about IoT.
During the interview, we were surprised to find out she enjoys hands-on experience with the devices without attaining theoretical knowledge and would work on them even in her free time.
She would even use her free time to tinker with different gadgets. We wonder if this means that the freshers would like a more practical and hands-on approach to learning.
Would they learn and enjoy it more if they tried it out rather than just reading about it?
How might we help students link theoretical and practical knowledge and provide a platform to practically apply the concepts they've learned?

Problem Statement

How might we help students link theoretical and practical knowledge and provide a platform/platforms to apply the concepts they've learned practically?

Time for ideating solutions:

To generate ideas, we, as a cohort, got together for about 40 minutes, and brainstormed as many ideas as possible. We generated 30 possible ideas and shared them with the participants we interviewed.

Our guidelines for the ideation process:
(I learned these guidelines from the resources shared during the program)

Suspend all judgments and accept all ideas - (even if it is inane because what seems stupid now, maybe THE SOLUTION LATER)
Build the concept of others - (always use "yes, and" not "yes, but")
Be creative in visually presenting and collating ideas - (use sticky notes or other forms of visual presentation)

Our ideas:

Most of our ideas included activities that could be conducted as co-curricular activities post-classroom sessions or could be included within classroom sessions.

One of our ideas for programming courses was to introduce short-timed programming tasks that allowed the students to collaboratively create solutions through platforms like "HackerRank" for the concepts they learned in the class hour. This type of collaborative learning spike students' interest in learning programming practically by collaborating and solving problems with their friends.

Paper Prototype of Ideas:

Since we are developing solutions for what seems almost like a process/service-based problem, we created paper prototypes to present to the students.

We selected a few ideas from the list we visually presented on the board and created a paper prototype to show to the students to receive feedback.

Feedback from the students:

The participants were surprised to see many innovative solutions framed quickly and felt happy. Many liked our ideas, while a few doubted whether they would work in the classroom because they were unsure if the educators would maintain the same consistency in adapting to our teaching method ideas in the long run.

Shift the focus:

While we ideated a lot for solving student problems, we had almost forgotten to think if the solutions we developed would be accepted and used by the faculty. In addition, we needed to validate if the faculty well received our ideas.

It was almost humanly impossible to conduct short discussions with all the teaching faculty and the administrators from our college. Hence we conducted a design thinking workshop, which would collectively allow all participants to share ideas and learn from one another.

How did we prepare design thinking workshops for faculty?

We mixed the faculty participants from different departments to participate in a team of 4-5.
We briefly explained the design thinking process and presented them with real-issue prompts that we gathered from our interviews with the students.
We then allowed the faculty, in groups, to work together to ideate on solutions they thought were essential.
Finally, we presented our ideas to them.

Snapshots of faculties work

Outcome of the Design Thinking Workshop

The faculty loved the design thinking workshop! Most of their ideas almost resonated with what we presented, and they were optimistic about implementing the same in the classroom and laboratory learning settings.

The change model canvas

The change model canvas is derived from the business model canvas typically used in businesses to render a blueprint of the change-making process.

Here, we use the change model canvas to jot down various factors we should be mindful of before implementing the change.

We presented the change model canvas to our institution's higher stakeholders to receive feedback and inform them of our change plans within our learning environment.

The Final Result:

I cannot share the artifacts (photos, videos) of the changed classroom learning environment (because of confidential matters). However, I proudly state that my college, Vidyavardhaka College of Engineering, has excelled in providing top-notch educational experiences to students.
(Contact me to know more)

We now have more than 30 student clubs to engage students in their extra-curricular pursuits; we regularly conduct design thinking workshops for faculty and students, and the change agents still monitor and advocate for growth on campus even after our graduation.

PS: Learn more about our change plans here.

University Innovation Fellows

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