Enhancing the Student Experience

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Message Enhancing the Student Experience The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University offers master’s and doctoral degrees in public administration and urban planning, and has built a strong reputation for combining academic theory with hands-on practice. The school ranks among the top 10 public affairs graduate schools in the United States, according to U.S. News & World Report. NYU Wagner already provides a compelling program for its students, and its leadership is always looking to do more. To this end, Ellen Schall, dean of NYU Wagner, approached IDEO to help explore ways that the school might enhance the overall student experience - without disrupting what was happening in classrooms or complicating an already difficult economic climate. NYU Wagner chose IDEO because of its innovative approach to discovery and its ability to develop thoughtful and meaningful solutions with “end users” as the focus. Together the partners engaged in a 12-week collaborative effort to better understand what it means to be a graduate student at NYU Wagner. Design team members immersed themselves in the school’s community, participated in dynamic conversations with students, faculty, staff, and alumni, and observed classes and campus events. Ultimately, these interactions inspired a set of concepts that create new - and support existing - key moments along the student journey. IDEO’s work produced a series of frames through which NYU Wagner could view the student experience. These outside perspectives helped school leaders grasp in tangible ways what they already knew intuitively. For example, IDEO presented a new way of identifying students based on their motivation for returning to graduate school and the clarity of their professional goals: “Surveyors” want a comprehensive view of the landscape to understand the range of possibilities available to them. “Explorers” are more actively engaged in their own process of discovery, evaluating their choices along the way. “Navigators” have honed in on a final destination and have crafted a tactical plan to ensure they reach their goals. This segmentation framework helped NYU Wagner to understand the behaviors of different students and to imagine design solutions that fulfill their varied intentions (while appreciating that the categories are not necessarily linear and that any one student can shift perspective during the course of her or his time at NYU Wagner). “IDEO helped us be clear that we wanted to understand the student experience, not the faculty or staff’s perception of the student experience,” Schall says. NYU Wagner’s collaboration with IDEO resulted in a powerful story. By weaving the new concepts and experiences into the chronological narrative of a hypothetical student (from when she first became interested in the school through becoming an alumna), the team demonstrated how each element fits into and enhances the overall student experience. NYU Wagner is now in the process of implementing many of IDEO’s tangible design suggestions, a few of which are as simple as converting existing spaces into quiet study areas. Other ideas are more involved. NYU Wagner plans to create “a more sophisticated, structured, and staged series of ‘welcome’ communications with its newly admitted students,” says David Schachter, assistant dean for student affairs and NYU Wagner’s project manager on the work with IDEO. The school also aims to introduce an academic networking site for students that will encourage them to make connections around policy and management issues and will act as a repository and promotional tool for student work. “As part of our web redesign, we are looking to create more robust ways for our students to connect with each other, and this academic networking page has the potential to be a categorized archive of research, events, papers, blogs, and projects that will enable students to connect with one another across a number of variables, including public service interest areas,” Schachter says. http://www.ideo.com/work/enhancing-the-student-experience/

The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University offers master’s and doctoral degrees in public administration and urban planning, and has built a strong reputation for combining academic theory with hands-on practice. The school ranks among the top 10 public affairs graduate schools in the United States, according to U.S. News & World Report. NYU Wagner already provides a compelling program for its students, and its leadership is always looking to do more. To this end, Ellen Schall, dean of NYU Wagner, approached IDEO to help explore ways that the school might enhance the overall student experience - without disrupting what was happening in classrooms or complicating an already difficult economic climate.

NYU Wagner chose IDEO because of its innovative approach to discovery and its ability to develop thoughtful and meaningful solutions with “end users” as the focus. Together the partners engaged in a 12-week collaborative effort to better understand what it means to be a graduate student at NYU Wagner. Design team members immersed themselves in the school’s community, participated in dynamic conversations with students, faculty, staff, and alumni, and observed classes and campus events. Ultimately, these interactions inspired a set of concepts that create new - and support existing - key moments along the student journey.

IDEO’s work produced a series of frames through which NYU Wagner could view the student experience. These outside perspectives helped school leaders grasp in tangible ways what they already knew intuitively. For example, IDEO presented a new way of identifying students based on their motivation for returning to graduate school and the clarity of their professional goals: “Surveyors” want a comprehensive view of the landscape to understand the range of possibilities available to them. “Explorers” are more actively engaged in their own process of discovery, evaluating their choices along the way. “Navigators” have honed in on a final destination and have crafted a tactical plan to ensure they reach their goals.

This segmentation framework helped NYU Wagner to understand the behaviors of different students and to imagine design solutions that fulfill their varied intentions (while appreciating that the categories are not necessarily linear and that any one student can shift perspective during the course of her or his time at NYU Wagner). “IDEO helped us be clear that we wanted to understand the student experience, not the faculty or staff’s perception of the student experience,” Schall says.

NYU Wagner’s collaboration with IDEO resulted in a powerful story. By weaving the new concepts and experiences into the chronological narrative of a hypothetical student (from when she first became interested in the school through becoming an alumna), the team demonstrated how each element fits into and enhances the overall student experience. NYU Wagner is now in the process of implementing many of IDEO’s tangible design suggestions, a few of which are as simple as converting existing spaces into quiet study areas.

Other ideas are more involved. NYU Wagner plans to create “a more sophisticated, structured, and staged series of ‘welcome’ communications with its newly admitted students,” says David Schachter, assistant dean for student affairs and NYU Wagner’s project manager on the work with IDEO.

The school also aims to introduce an academic networking site for students that will encourage them to make connections around policy and management issues and will act as a repository and promotional tool for student work. “As part of our web redesign, we are looking to create more robust ways for our students to connect with each other, and this academic networking page has the potential to be a categorized archive of research, events, papers, blogs, and projects that will enable students to connect with one another across a number of variables, including public service interest areas,” Schachter says.