Outreach is a two-way communication between an organization and stakeholders; it is to start where the client is, outside the office – in the community. Outreach is an intervention, program, or activity conducted by an organization, face-to-face with individuals, an organization’s staff, leaders, educators, politicians and the community. Outreach programs are broadly classified into two types, namely; organization outreach and individual outreach. The audience, goals, design and implementation strategies, and challenges for these outreach programs varies widely. Organization Outreach Programs (OOP) are based on a two-way communication. The objectives of these outreach programs are manifold; to gain feedback from on curricula, to provide networking opportunities for existing learners, to market executive education programs, and to advice beneficiaries on new concepts and emerging technologies. Individual Outreach Program (IOP) activities encourage enrolment and aim to provide awareness of enhancing an individual’s career development.
To design a high quality and successful outreach program Design Thinking (DT) Methodology can be used. DT is an approach to innovation that helps create new user experience for any products, services, processes, events, software applications and even policies. It helps to ensure that the right solution is built and that teams building the solution are equipped to do so. The effort to understand and validate what the right problem minimizes expensive redesigns in later phases. The core concept of the DT process is the emphasis on addressing the needs of the users.
The DT consists of many stages; empathy stage aids in understanding the learners followed by the define stage that uses the findings from the empathy stage to help refine the main objectives of the outreach program. The ideate stage helps to generate innovative ideas for the outreach program. The prototype stage directed at implementing the selected idea as a pilot run with mock learners. The measure stage helps to collect metrics and to analyse the efficacy of the outreach program.
Empathy
When studying the consumer, the emphasis is on putting oneself in the intimate space of the consumer, and then to seek to understand them much deeper than surface demographics and simple psychographics.
Define
The define stage took empathy stage content, and converted key ideas and trends into a design challenge. The questions to answer during this stage were something such as “How might we…?
Ideate
The main goal of the ideate stage was to brainstorm and come up with creative solutions. The ideate phase of design thinking plays a vital role in the process.
Prototype
Based on the ideation stage discussions, the prototype of the complete outreach devised. For example Prototype for the Outreach Camp, Focus Group, success story, Tracer Studies…etc.
Results, Lessons Learned, and Conclusions
The feedback or lessons learned from applying outreach program.
Non-formal Adult Learning Centers but also VET centers mandated to cater for adult learners could apply the DT in other areas such as curriculum redesign and administration process redesign, next to designing their outreach strategies.
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