How to use Design Thinking in Learning Language?
By Leah Buley

Learning may take place in a classroom full of students (or an office full of coworkers), but the fact is that it is personal—especially when it comes to learning a new language. Unfortunately, creating unique, personalised experiences for employees has not always been straightforward for HR and learning & development professionals. However, owing to technological improvements, design thinking has revolutionised how we acquire new skills at work—we now have the potential to build human-centered apps and programmes tailored to individual learners.

Using Design Thinking to Improve Language Learning

Design thinking is split down into five basic steps: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, and test, all of which can (and should!) be used to improve workplace education and language training by HR and learning and development teams.

Empathise: Understand the language learner's objectives

Understanding the aims of the learners is the first stage in building language courses. Knowing each employee's requirements and objectives will allow you to create a learning programme that will help them reach their personal goals more efficiently.

Define: Recognising knowledge gaps and issues

Once you've determined your learners' requirements and desires, it's time to pinpoint the issue areas. Because of the lesser degree of lexical similarity, a native Japanese speaker may find it more challenging to learn Spanish than a native Italian speaker. Problems should be presented in human-centric words so that learners and L&D experts can both comprehend and agree on specific pain points. You should also decide what success looks like for each individual at this point. 

Ideate: Come up with solutions and next actions

Now that you've determined what the final result should be, it's time to work out how learners can get there. What kind of learning content should be provided, and how should it be delivered? This is where tools like AI, machine learning, and virtual classroom trainers come in handy, as they can provide personalised strategies and tactics that are tailored to the needs of certain learners. AI may be used in digital language learning programmes to examine behaviour and provide suitable content/methods that can assist learners accomplish the goals defined in phase one, similar to how Netflix analyses user activity to recommend films and TV episodes.

Designing a digital language learning environment as a prototype

During the prototype stage, you will be able to put your suggestions into action. If you believe that learners would prefer video information to written material, film a brief tutorial or lecture. The goal is to determine if these new content distribution and teaching approaches are producing the expected results. Before more organised testing, prototyping will give the insights needed to iterate and enhance a suggested learning system.

Evaluation: Improving the best learning experience

Testing is the final stage in creating a digital language learning programme. This approach, like prototyping, may be performed indefinitely to improve the user experience. 

Better Work Comes from Design Thinking

Companies may deliver adaptive and personalised language-learning solutions in the workplace by using design thinking in digital language learning. In today's market, where language skills may provide a significant competitive edge, HR and L&D professionals can use this strategy to achieve individual and company success. A company can only prosper if its personnel succeed, and learning and development programmes play a significant part in this. Applying design thinking to all training is critical to ensure that each team member has the information they (and the firm) require to go ahead.