Design Thinking for Creating Educational Innovations for Teachers in the Digital Age

Design thinking is a systematic process of creating innovations that centers around users, emphasizing diverse ideas along with the possibilities of modern digital technologies under the digital environment nowadays to address user-related problems that affect users, which results in building prototypes to be rapidly tried, tested, and refined until a solution that addresses the user-related problems is achieved. The process of creating innovations according to design thinking can be applied to innovate within educational contexts, allowing teachers to use innovations derived from this process to cope with student-related problems of learning management appropriately and adapt to the challenging digital environment that has significantly transformed the way students learn nowadays. As a result, teachers play a crucial role in creating educational innovations to keep up with modern digital technologies, making them suitable in accordance with digital trends and beneficial for students under today’s digital environment. The design thinking process consists of five key steps that focus on students as the central point, that is, empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing. When it is applied along with educational application guidelines, these five steps of design thinking can effectively and efficiently address learning management problems in the digital age, ultimately leading to improved learning quality. Therefore, this article aims to present a design thinking process to help teachers understand and apply it to innovate in education, thereby addressing learning challenges in the digital age that have resulted in ineffective and inefficient student learning. This will ultimately lead to better quality learning experiences for students in the future.