Leverage innovative design thinking to design a technologyenhanced interactive learning environment

Abstract

Through the dedicated efforts of design researchers, practitioners, and educators, the importance of design thinking has been increasingly recognized by the society in general, and by the engineering community in particular. On one hand, innovative design is commonly recognized to be a highly globalized activity that requires the effective collaboration between global stakeholders to deliver. Nevertheless, to date, there remains far from enough global design and/or innovation courses available in the current engineering education system, upon which, the global students can jointly develop, sharpen their collaborative design knowledge, skill and attitude. On the other hand, although technology is widely acknowledged to be a driven force of globalization, relatively few efforts have been devoted to leveraging the power of modern eLearning technologies in order to provide the global design learning experience right on participating student's home campus with no more expensive international travels. Against such a background, this paper presents some of our best practices of employing innovative design thinking to systemically develop a technology-enabled global design innovation course. Not only we presented a set of domain-independent design thinking principles to guide the course design, but also we elaborated the chosen technologies and the functional requirement that each technology is meant to satisfy. The course in question has been consecutively offered for 6 years so far. An evaluation is conducted upon on the 2014 spring class in order to solicit students' satisfaction with the course.