"

14 Incorporating design thinking

One approach to designing your Open course is to employ ‘design thinking’. This will help you to ensure that what you create is aimed appropriately at the needs of your learners.

Design thinking is a collaborative, human-centred approach that seeks to identify the real problem (rather than its symptoms) and generates a wide range of solutions before converging on a proposal to solve the problem. It can help prevent the creation of a course that seems appropriate but that doesn’t meet the needs of the intended target audience.

The diagram below shows the five stages of the design thinking process:

  1. Empathise – Understanding people.
  2. Define – Figure out the problem.
  3. Ideate – Generate ideas.
  4. Prototype – Create and experiment.
  5. Test – Refine the product.
diagram following a loop of stages: Empathise, define, ideate, prototype, define
Image adapted from Design Thinking: https://www.acte.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/What-is-Design-thinking-Acte-2048×1140.png.  As the diagram’s helix-shaped structure suggests, the design thinking approach isn’t an end-to-end process; it is a continuous cycle that ensures solutions continue to meet the needs of users. However, it’s best practice to consider the needs of your learners first; the empathy part of the process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Licence

Icon for the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Broadening Blueprint for Open Pathways Copyright © 2025 by University of Leeds is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book