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This Challenge was launched to surface collaborative ideas from those who are impacted most by school closures including parents/caregivers, students, and educators. More than 400 creative ideas from around the world were submitted by people striving to reshape schools and learning post-COVID.
Following the Challenge, a team of designers and researchers from IDEO synthesized submissions to better understand how current solutions and practices may foreshadow future trends in education.
XQ high school students who have been adapting to school closures reviewed and selected submissions, based on their alignment to the Principles of Impact and Scalability developed by HundrED. 20 selected submissions were announced on June 23, 2020 and will be offered the following resources:
Explore the Insights that emerged from the Challenge.
Take a look at the 20 selected concepts that emerged from the Ideas Phase!
Check out our recent webinar with a panel of educators and learning experts.
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The world is currently united in confronting the consequences of COVID-19. For 91% of students, parents, and educators around the world, a front-and-center challenge is how to adapt to learning from home.
Seemingly overnight students have had to adjust their definition of “classroom,” and parents have taken on a new responsibility in addition to finding or maintaining a job.
We feel this reality daily at IDEO. We’re trying, best we can, to share advice or offer support to suddenly stretched colleagues balancing business pressures with 1st graders seeking some post-lunch play time. Our Teachers Guild and Design For Learning studio are conversing daily with students and educators, revealing the need to both respond to the immediate concerns of educators and families, while also reimagining more equitable and resilient learning systems for the future.
All the ingenuity we see is inspiring. Communities are mobilizing to provide essential services in ways we might never have thought possible before this outbreak began. Educators and students, alike, are adapting on the fly to remote classrooms—sometimes upending decades-old models of learning over the course of a single video conference session.
The education system has long been ripe for this sort of radically imaginative thinking. And nobody knows this more than those who work within it. Many inequalities exposed by this crisis were already there when it started and are only deepening. Some of the biggest, most fundamental questions about how we teach and learn no longer have the luxury of being considered slowly. The urgency to evolve is suddenly here.
During this moment, we've been wondering...
In all of it, we see possibility. With deliberate action, many of the innovations we can imagine in this moment can lead us to a future that is more vibrant, equitable, and engaging for every student. One teacher’s experimental stopgap solution today might be the status quo of 2021. One school district’s hacked-together emergency plan could become common practice for entire nations.
That’s why we’re launching this challenge. We want to use IDEO’s power as a connector within the education system, and help great ideas reach the innovators and funders who can help them take hold. We want to spotlight the best examples of creativity and resourcefulness among educators and families, so every learning community has a chance to emerge from this better than it entered.
We’re inviting you to show us: What are you trying? What are your hopes for the future? And of course, what are you learning?
Read The Full Brief
How might we learn from the extraordinary creativity emerging from this mass experiment in remote learning? (limited to 1000 words)
Research shows that times of crisis often provoke periods of intense learning and experimentation. Without much warning, educators, families, and students were thrust into a mass experiment in learning from home. We suspect that when we look back on this time, we’ll see that it resulted in a number of innovations that forever change the way we do school.
We’re inspired by Kristen Berbawy, Teacher in Fremont, CA.
How might we ensure that our most vulnerable students and families are supported through school closures? (limited to 1000 words)
This moment is exposing the many inequities in our education systems—from the technology required for remote learning, to the support services needed to establish safety and wellbeing. For the millions of students who have special needs, are homeless, food insecure, or without health care, school is often their only safety net. Planning for a post-pandemic world starts by recognizing that some students are especially vulnerable when schools close.
We’re inspired by Austin Independent School District’s Wifi Buses
How might we ensure that students are still able to nurture relationships with their peers, develop their talents, and celebrate important milestones? (limited to 1000 words)
For most students school isn’t just about academics, it is also about social interactions. As we near the end of the school year, many students are feeling the loss of social connections and milestone events like sports tournaments, end-of-year performances and showcases, award assemblies, prom and graduation.
We’re inspired by Kirsten Dickerson, Teacher, Lakewood, OH
Idea Starter 4: Surprise Us!
What have we missed? (limited to 1000 words)
Inspire us with insights, examples and stories which go beyond our Idea Starters for this challenge.
Throughout the Challenge, you will see Community Coaches engaging with your ideas. While they are not able to comment on every post or join every conversation—we do hope to spark discussion, reflection and action, and help our OpenIDEO community thrive.
International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), is home to a passionate community of global educators who believe in the power of technology to transform teaching and learning, accelerate innovation and solve tough problems in education.
The Teachers Guild is a member-led community of teachers who are committed to becoming a creative force for our students, schools, and communities through our Design Thinking for Educators Toolkit, online platform, coaching program, local events, and partner network. These tools help teachers design better solutions for students’ evolving needs, creating systemic change for and from their classrooms.
School Retool is professional development fellowship that helps public school leaders redesign and transform school culture. The program is grounded in the notion that big change starts small, and by implementing small, scrappy experiments or “hacks,” one can effect large-scale transformation.
HundrED.Org is a not-for-profit organization, which seeks and shares inspiring innovations in K12 education. Our goal is to help improve education and inspire a movement by encouraging pedagogically sound, ambitious innovations to spread across the world.
TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education initiative. TED-Ed’s mission is to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Everything we do supports learning — from producing a growing library of original animated videos, to providing an international platform for teachers to create their own interactive lessons, to helping curious students around the globe bring TED to their schools and gain presentation literacy skills, to celebrating innovative leadership within TED-Ed’s global network of over 250,000 teachers.
Tracee Worley
Senior Design Lead
Becky Lee
Senior Business Development Lead
Molly McMahon
Senior Product Director
Alysha English
Senior Community Specialist
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