Emergency remote teaching for design thinking in health innovation

Abstract

In March of 2020, South Africa responded to the global COVID-19 pandemic by instituting a full lockdown. This meant that only essential services were allowed to operate, causing schools, universities and workplaces to close. The University of Cape Town was about to complete its first term when this occurred. With campuses closed, students were asked to vacate residences and return home. The university went into emergency remote teaching, with all teaching and learning moving online. Students were provided with the necessary resources to access content via the university learning platform, but strict guidelines were set to ensure that the delivery of content was not data or bandwidth intensive. For our master’s-level course on Health Innovation and Design, this posed many challenges. Health Innovation and Design is part of the curriculum for the MPhil in Health Innovation and the MSc in Biomedical Engineering. It utilises design thinking methodologies as an approach to innovate for improvements in health and wellbeing. The course comprises group-based action learning with a project partner and endeavours to promote engaged scholarship (UCT, 2020) by interacting with constituencies outside the university for public good. For 2020, we had secured the provincial Department of Health as our project partner. Our students were going to work with a team on designing and developing an operating theatre information system for scheduling. We would have had our first hospital visit the week after the university closed its on-campus activities.