DXC Diary Entry #3: Reflections on Sprint 2
Hello there! We are a team of 4 Digital Transformation Design trainees from the Design Across Cultures track of the Spring 2021 semester at the Digital Society School. From February 2021 to June 2021, we will be working on a project partnered with the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences/Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA).
Welcome to our Medium diary: a diary of articles highlighting our collective journey, experiences and key aha! moments. In this entry, I will tell you about our second 4-week journey with this project i.e. Sprint 2. I recommend you to read the previous 2 Medium entries so that you get more context before diving into this one. You can find Entry #1 here and Entry #2 here.
Over the course of the next 3 months, our team has been tasked with designing an intervention that will address the forty per cent drop-out rate among students with an MBO background who are transitioning to HBO bachelors at the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries (FDMCI) in the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences/Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA).
We ended our previous Sprint with a firm understanding of the Dutch education system, stakeholders surrounding this topic and existing explanations of challenges experienced by students in this transition. We kicked off Sprint 2 by doing sprint planning where we defined an overarching goal and some sub-goals that we aimed to achieve through the course of this sprint.
Sprint 2 goal
How might we extract, synthesise and prototype insights from (possible) actors and resources affecting the MBO>HBO transition from the FDMCI faculty, HvA in order to kick off ideation?
Subgoals that we accomplished in Sprint 2
- Interviewed non-student stakeholders related to the MBO>HBO transition from the FDMCI faculty at HvA
- Tried to get in touch with MBO-graduates who have experienced the transition
- Ideated & created a prototype that can help us understand how students experience educational transitions in a broader context (not just MBO>HBO students)
Interactions with non-student stakeholders
We interacted with a wide set of stakeholders from the HvA including a teacher, dean, student councillor and research experts. Through these interactions, we aimed to understand their unique perspectives
We condensed quotes and insights from these stakeholder interviews into a (complex to look at but actually quite straightforward) affinity map. Here’s an image to give you an idea!
After synthesis, we eventually identified 6 directions/need statements:
- HBO students with an MBO background need a safe and connected space at the university.
- MBO-graduates should be able to learn new soft and hard skills.
- MBO-graduates should be able to explore their existing talents and continue developing them in the future.
- Support for MBO-graduates in building better relationships with themselves, fellow students and teachers.
- MBO-graduates should know that there is no rush to do HBO. What are their long term goals? It can be different for everyone.
- HBO administration and teachers expect the students to be responsible and independent enough to identify their issues and reach out to solve them.
Interesting observations from these interactions
- Even though these interactions were done one-on-one, the responses from all the stakeholders had a common thread. For example, when asked what would help these students, a common response we observed was “a feeling of community and support so that they don’t feel alone”.
- The stakeholders used a lot of metaphors to describe the MBO>HBO transition to us. Metaphors are widely used when describing a sensitive and complex situation to people who want to know more about it. For example, some metaphors used were: the backpack of MBO-graduates should be filled with soft and hard skills before climbing the (HBO) mountain; HBO is a high-speed train and if one doesn’t jump on it immediately, they can easily get stuck in the tracks.
Efforts to get in touch with students
Through this sprint, we tried to get in touch with MBO-graduate students through social media, HvA administration and our personal contacts.
However, we were unsuccessful in doing this. The key learning for us was that this group of students is really hard to reach. On top of that, since this is a sensitive topic, many students don’t feel comfortable openly speak about it.
This, in itself, was an important discovery for us. It showed us how students experience this transition, how isolating it can be and how much of a taboo it currently is. We also realised that we need to spend more time developing a new approach to reach these students in the next sprint (Sprint 3).
Research through design: a prototype for analogous insights
Analogous research is a form of exploration that takes a team outside of its main focus to find inspiration in the ways others face and tackle similar challenges. These immersive experiences allow us to move beyond our expertise and to see challenges with fresh eyes.
Since we couldn’t reach actual MBO-graduate students who have experienced this transition, we decided to take an analogous approach so that we can empathise with them to some extent at least.
We had an ideation session where we built on each other’s ideas (using the 6–3–5 method) and finally dot-voted (more like star-voted) for the one that seemed most ideal. The idea we all voted for was to create a collection of anonymous audio stories about how DSS trainees have experienced their transition to DSS and its radical new ways of working.
Through it, we aimed to draw analogous inspiration for our project. This prototype could possibly be a future probe for conversations with MBO-graduate students, teachers and other stakeholders.
Using phonic.ai, we created an anonymous story collection asking questions like “we all experienced challenges adjusting in the first days and weeks in the program. If you did as well, could you tell us about a challenge you have faced while adjusting to DSS?”. People responded through voice recordings. We then gathered those stories on Notion so that we could listen to them in the next sprint (Sprint 3) and gather insights along common grounds of educational transitions.
One thing we aim to keep in mind through this process is that this is, indeed, analogous research and is not a replacement for MBO-graduates. However, it sure did give us a head start into understanding education transitions from student perspectives. With this, we came to the end of Sprint 2.
Reflections
This sprint was definitely somewhat of a bumpy ride for us. With one of our dear teammates getting COVID, another travelling across continents, another loaded with freelance and job work and another bogged down with thesis deadlines, we sure had our ups and downs. But we also learnt more about our individual work schedules, goals, lives and personalities.
At the end of Sprint 2, we had a retrospective where we openly addressed each of our motivations and worries. Communication is key and through it, we managed to self-reflect and design a whole new way of working that suited each one of us.
