I took the design thinking approach to the course I am developing. It is a short course on Research-policy communication”. It is aimed at PhD students and fresh post-doctoral fellows (<2 years after the completion of their PhD). It is to be proposed to organisations such as MITACS and research universities as a complementary course for their students and fellows.
I am starting from scratch. Such a course has not been offered so far at all anywhere I have looked. As we are working on an Orientation Module, I decided that what is needed at this point in the course is an ice-breaker. At MET’s courses this is usually dealt with by asking the students to present themselves. I wanted to tackle the presentation less up-front, so I decided to propose an asynchronous activity. The students will share their thoughts about the way their research can bring change to the world. They are asked to find/take a picture that bests describes the reality that they want to see impacted by their research. Then they are asked to reflect in three sentences what it is about and how they think it can be changed. They are also invited to react to each other posts.
I really like your idea of asking students to uploading a picture that “best describes the reality that they want to see impacted by their research.”.Technology has come a long way allowing us to truly make use of multimedia and multi-modal tools and platforms to express our thoughts. A picture is worth a thousand words.