Applying Design Thinking to Improve Students' Experience in Online Hospitality Courses

The purpose of this article is to introduce the design thinking approach and illustrate how it may be used to facilitate an online course redesign by providing a specific example. This article builds on the theoretical foundation of the design thinking literature. It reviews the stages of the design thinking process, namely empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The paper also presents an example of design thinking steps being applied to a graduate online hospitality course. The paper used a survey with both qualitative and quantitative questions to understand student experiences in this course, to identify students' goals and challenges, and to build student personas. This research presents one of the personas developed for the redesigned course and offers an approach to redesigning the class to improve the learning experience for this persona. The approach presented in this paper may be useful to other instructors, program directors, hospitality and tourism training professionals, and instructional designers.