Abstract:

Background and Purpose:
The birth of the networked, globalized and digitized society has engendered deep needs for changes in the Master level education. As the society has shifted from the technology-focused stage of the information society to the phase, which is based on customer needs, the customer orientation has become a big competitive advantage for any organization. Also in education more agile and learner-centered development approaches are needed. The development of education has typically been very provider-dominant starting from the education provider´s own processes and resources, e.g. competences of staff and learning environments. Learners are then forced to adapt their activities to these processes and resources. The recent trend of integrating design thinking into service development turns the process over by starting from deeply understanding customers’ activities, and then based on deep customer insight, designing new ways to support customers’ activities and embed the service in customers’ existing and future contexts and activities. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the methods and tools of design thinking can be applied in developing the Master level adult education and new learning environments that truly support learners’ activities and their short- and long-term objectives.

Methodology:
The empirical paper is based on a future-oriented service design process that went through the phases of:
1) understanding the needs of students,
2) ideating with the students and other stakeholders,
3) prototyping new educational service and learning environments and
4) finally conceptualizing the service with the help of the Service Logic Business Model Canvas.
The data generating methods used during this process include probes, interviews, contextual observations and workshops with part-time Master degree students, their instructors and other stakeholders. Almost 100 adult students, who study alongside their full-time job a Master level degree in Business Administration, Health Care, IT or Hospitality, were involved in the design process. The design tools that are used to describe to results are Persons and the Service Logic Business Model Canvas.

Findings:
Given the high degree of co-creation of educational service, there is an evident opportunity to integrate the students in the development of education. The findings show that the methods and tools of design thinking are very powerful in bringing the students and their service experience into the center of educational service development. Creating the Persons clearly facilitates the search for learner-centricity and adopting the Service Logic Business Model Canvas provides a comprehensive view on potential improvements. The canvas shows the students’ every day needs and contexts and it suggests a value proposition how the educational service can support their activities and needs. The canvas helps to understand the student’s experience also before and after the actual studying process and know how the value of learning is experienced in the student’s own context. The canvas also includes the service provider’s and the students’ resources, their key activities and the partners involved in the learning process. These design methods and tools give education providers opportunities to understand and create truly learner-centered learning environments and educational service.

Keywords:

Adult education, design thinking, learner-centricity, higher education.