Teaching Design Thinking Using Online Whiteboarding in a Graduate-level Digital Innovation Course

Abstract

Design thinking has gained popularity in many tertiary education disciplines. However, the teaching of this topic and imparting students with the skills to improve their innovation competence are challenging tasks. In this paper, we examine the use of an online whiteboarding system as a platform to teach design thinking. The system was used by students in a graduate-level digital innovation course to complete their service design project. The project required them to generate IT-enabled service innovations by following the design thinking framework on the whiteboarding system. Results from 54 students show that online whiteboarding can be a very effective tool to develop design thinking skills. Additionally, we also investigate the relationships between the creative mindset of the learners and the different stages of design thinking. Our findings suggest that learners with growth creative mindsets report a higher level of perceived usefulness of whiteboarding as compared to fixed creative mindsets in terms of empathizing, defining and ideating stages of the design thinking process. The study is novel to the extent that it explores the use of online whiteboarding as a new learning platform to handle the challenging task of teaching design thinking and examines the relationships between learners’ creative mindset and their perceptions of employing online whiteboarding in project-based learning.