Reimagining premedical foundation blended curriculum through design thinking: A qualitative study

Abstract

The shift in teaching and learning following the pandemic encouraged faculty and teaching staff to seek creative teaching methods, find different means to engage students online, and provide students with the opportunity to be creative themselves and enjoy their learning journey. In the Spring of 2021, a design thinking (DT) unit was designed and integrated into the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course for foundation students enrolled in a premedical programme at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar. The teaching team consisting of the course director, a teaching specialist, and a librarian curated a series of reading materials to introduce students to DT and its applications in different interdisciplinary areas including healthcare and medicine.As students were getting acquainted with the literature, they were also working in groups of three to identify a problem in their everyday lives, investigate the problem, and brainstorm a human-centred solution. The teaching team provided the students with guiding instructions throughout the DT project by delivering mini presentations for each of the four phases. The college’s learning management system Canvas was used to facilitate online group work and create a series of mini assignments to assess students’ deliverables.The problems tackled by the students and the range of solutions they presented show the highly creative potential of first-year college students, their awareness of current issues in various organisations, particularly in healthcare, and their ability to leverage technology to design solutions for everyday problems.This paper presents the findings of a programme improvement project that investigates two questions in relation to the effectiveness of technology-enabled DT for foundation students’ learning and their perceptions of their learning through exposure to DT. The paper analyses the findings from students’ reflections on the DT project and provides a clear description of the developed DT unit and its integration in an undergraduate curriculum to promote students’ creativity, problem-solving, and teamwork.Keywords: design thinking; premedical education; English for Academic Purposes; social constructivism; blended learning; human-centred solution; teamworkPart of the Special Issue Technology and educational ‘pivoting’ in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic <https://doi.org/10.21428/8c225f6e.0a9292af>