👋 Hi there! Hope you’re having a great summer so far. I’ve been noticing a dip in open rates which I hope means you’re enjoying vacations before the wheels of Fall start turning again.
I’m recording this one to listen on the beach, your commute, or your office if you prefer, let me know if you like the addition.
I’m writing because education wasn't designed around students, but we can improve the learner experience through design. I share stories, tips, and work in progress weekly.
Why it matters:
Too often, students are expected to navigate systems that weren’t designed with them in mind. But when we bring the right people into the room: students, staff, faculty, employers—and design around real needs, something shifts. New energy. New ownership. New clarity. This isn’t just about generating ideas. It’s about building the trust, momentum, and shared responsibility needed to move them forward.
Because the student experience is the institution. And improving it is everyone’s job.
Go deeper:
“It was powerful to to hear feedback directly from students to help inform our idea. We were headed in a totally different direction until they gave their input.”
“This process and being together with employers, students, and staff at the career center all at once definitely helped us move faster.”
Collaboration That Feels Different
I love hearing these stories in sessions, but its even more important to me that it drives real outcomes. Starts new partnerships and collaboration. Results in real progress, concepts, and ultimately experiments that help teams learn and solve real problems for their stakeholders, especially when they’re students.
I like to make the joke to teams that without their engagement in the work and investment in the outcome that I’m just a guy in an empty room with a lot of paper.
Purpose Drives Progress
I consistently hear that the most unique and useful part of the experience is bringing together students, faculty, employers, and staff to work on a solving a problem together.
I believe we’re all driven by purpose, however you define it and wherever you believe it comes from. And when we can anchor around the challenging negative experiences that other people are having, we get invested in the cause to address it. In improving experiences in higher education this is important not only to improve the way institutions work, but how people are formed through their experience.
The Risk of Getting It Wrong
The risk is significant because students place trust that their University will take care of them and not create unnecessary feelings of frustration, overwhelm, uncertainty, and loneliness that affects them personally, and the institutions they attend financially when they leave.
While we can do a lot through collaborative sessions and driving engagement on campus by working together, it’s often not enough. We all have areas we overlook and sometimes we’re too close to the problem to see it clearly or without our own bias.
Invite the Outside In
That’s why I build in one more layer of collaborative insight into my longer term engagements. I’ve heard them called “pressure tests,” or “crits,” or “inviting provocateurs,” but the goal is the same:
Share progress and insights with someone outside of the core project or University team to get feedback, refine concepts, and engage their expertise to look at the problem from a different angle.
Last month our project team defined 8 promising “Napkin Pitch” concepts from 150+ ideas that we generated based on the needs we identified from 20+ hours of interviews, 100s of survey responses, and other institutional and national data and trends.
With concepts and feedback from both employers and college leadership in hand, it was time to bring along some outside provocateurs to influence the direction of the concepts.
I was excited to bring in several edtech partners with knowledge of the problem spaces we were working on to address how could they help shape concepts from their knowledge of what’s happening on campuses across the country.
I prepped teams with questions to get started and scheduled them for 45 min blocks after catching teams up on our progress.
The partners knew this wasn’t a moment for a product demo or sales pitch, but to share what they’ve learned through hard fought lessons of trying to make progress on the space they’re focused on.
Naturally, the conversation generated some confidence and in some cases some “build vs. buy” evaluations as we continued to build out the ideas, but our next step was to identify the assumptions embedded in our ideas for us to design experiments around to validate that the idea is worth pursuing further.
What Needs to Be True
Rather than jumping to a solution (or immediately buying a technology), we’ll spend time as a team next month prioritizing experiments, developing a roadmap for testing, and either validate we’re solving the right problem or give us some data about the new direction they need to evolve into.
Pressure, Meet Purpose: Will we “Sponsor” the Change?
Teams shared a detailed blueprint “experience” of their ideas and the assumptions they’ve identified to test with College leadership to evaluate their viability (alignment to strategy, sustainability?); desirability (do people want it?); feasibility (is it possible and do we have resources?).
It’s the first of many experiments these concepts will have to survive before they clear the bar to become real, refined, problem-solving programs: Is there buy-in to pursue continuing to invest resources, time, energy, and effort to turn these papers into real experiences for students?
What Gets Built—and What Gets Better
If we can’t either find a path forward to pursue by adjusting non-critical elements of the concepts or don’t have the support from leaders to “Sponsor” them forward, the concept has some real work to do to make the case and convey the needs to drive resources and energy for the change.
That said, it’s hard to overcome the sense of responsibility to solve real problems once you surface them in the student experience. Design is change; human-centered, iterative, solution-oriented change that solves real problems for real people.
Insights from the Field
Bringing you voices from across education to answer:
What advice would you give to someone driving change in education?
“Transforming Higher Education Requires being Radically Human-Centered
In an era of disruptive change, higher education must shift from institutional preservation to radical empathy. To truly meet learners where they are, we must listen deeply—not just to what students say, but to what their lived experiences reveal. Human-centered transformation begins with understanding root causes: Why are students stopping out? What barriers—technological, emotional, financial—are going unspoken? Designing with communities, not just for them, ensures relevance and respect.
Empathy is not soft—it’s a disruptive force. It challenges legacy systems that no longer serve today’s learners' needs. Transformation isn’t about scaling what worked yesterday; it’s about co-creating what’s needed tomorrow. We must question outdated assumptions, center equity, and redesign pathways that acknowledge real lives and real potential. When higher ed leads with humility, curiosity, and courage, we stop asking students to fit the system—and instead build systems that fit students.”
Binh Thuy Do, Vice President of Research & Development, Calbright College
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