I just watched a video on Harvard’s “Inside the Case Method”, a method to teach business students. What seemed really interesting to me is that this method had a lot of similarities to the design thinking and seems almost as engaging.

There where a couple of quotes in the video which could have been easily originated from a design thinking documentary. Beside that, the process itself seemed striking similiar:

• Understanding / Observe : Student get all the facts and a problem, but no conclusion. Although this is done through prepared material, it wraps up the first 2 phases in design thinking.
• Define (point of view), students get into discussions about the findings to come up with a point of view.
• Ideate : based on these preparation their bring their ideas to class.
• Prototype/Test: While they’re in class students discuss and challenge themselves while taking on the role of persons which they have to make the decisions for (client, competitor, company). Although there is no real “user” involvement, people act out different positions to test their ideas. In addition students ask teachers (which could be seen as the professionals in this scenario) to comment on their ideas.

In my opinion, some similarities can also be found in the students engagement. In addition it is similar in the fact that it is not about repeating foreign knowledge but coming up with your own thoughts and learnings or, as their website put it:

“…we break the boundaries of passive learning to encourage students to become active participants in their own progress.”

And finally, students in this program seemed to have diverse backgrounds which is interpreted as an advantage by their peers.

So all in all there seam to be a lot of similarities in these two programs and I hope we will see more of these “learning by doing” approaches in education in the near future.