What We Do - Education Design Lab

How can we help?

The Lab’s superpower is to co-design and build equitable, learner-centered approaches with colleges, universities, employers, foundations, and regions.

If you need to design specifically for certain learner groups, grapple with how to adapt to the future of learning and work, or get to quick proof-points in a fast-evolving school-to-employment world, we specialize in that.

Our Services

Design, Launch, Scale Pilots

Design Challenges for Cohorts of Institutions or Partners

We work with cohorts of institutions over 1-2 years to co-create and launch new solutions to adapt to the changing needs of learners and employers

Custom Design Challenges for Institutions

We work with your faculty, administrators, and staff over 6-12 months on individual challenges to co-create new transformative solutions to drive learner success or define new markets

Make In-demand Skills More Visible + Portable

Jumpstart Strategies for Micro-credentials and Sub-degree Offerings

We support your administration and faculty in co-creating stackable micro-credentials to create more visible and actionable career pathways

Co-design with Employers to Create Data-driven Pathways

We facilitate with labor market data and local employers to help redefine and streamline learning pathways to higher paying jobs

Take a Regional Approach to Define New Credentials

We manage collaboratives to test and launch faster pathways to meet critical economic growth talent demand

Start Credentialing 21st Century Skills

We support institutions or workplaces in the intentional teaching, assessing, and credentialing for high demand 21st century skills

Training in Human-centered Design and Change Management

Example Services

Help Your Administrators, Faculty, Staff, Trustees, and Other Stakeholders Truly Understand Learner Needs

Our human-centered research team offers immersive sprints toward powerful, unique insights into the lived personal and learning experience of current and desired learner population(s)

Diagnose Your College’s True Value Proposition in a DIY Learning World

Our Lab team can help your administrators and faculty uncover your institutions key strengths and differentiators to better compete in the educational marketplace

Use Human-centered Design to Shift Mindsets About Institutional and Faculty Roles

Our Education Designers help your administrators, faculty, staff look into the future of work and learning and re-design processes and structures with the learner’s needs at the center

Set Up a Rapid Prototyping Innovation Lab for Learners and Faculty

Our Lab team can support your institution in co-designing and launching a rapid prototyping center for innovation that addresses the future of work and future of learning

When we got to work with the Lab, we got your expertise on the design thinking, as well as the other colleges to work with, and learning from them, with them, bringing in the experts that you’ve brought to help us better understand our students and what the world of possibility is. It has been amazing.

Dr. Sue Ellspermann

President, Ivy Tech Community College
We began with the data. Having the Education Design Lab convene us with our data played an important role in getting us to share our data honestly and openly. Their independence and neutrality created a space for us to be transparent and explore the problem together. Seeing the raw data was uncomfortable at times, but sometimes it’s the hard truths that lead you to the best solutions.

Dr. Mark Mrozinski

Assistant Vice President of Workforce Development Executive Dean of Community Education, Harper College

Our Process

We offer a proven structured design + build process that combines cutting-edge expertise in the future of work with a decade of human-centered design experience.

We follow a four-stage process, honed over 10 years of working with over 1,000 colleges and organizations, working with you on the ground to facilitate your design team, bring in subject matter experts, and harness insights from learners, faculty, employers, and staff to optimize opportunity spaces with data-driven concepts. Our project managers stay with you through an iterative pilot and evaluation stage.

Why the Lab?

We come with:

An innovation community of 2500 collaborators
Deep education and employer expertise
Micro-credentialing Expertise
An equity lens
A vision for the future of #AgileLearning in the age of the Learner Revolution
A track record managing and scaling large multi-stakeholder projects

We are:

Pioneers in human-centered design for education institutions
A nonprofit with strong entrepreneurial skills

I think the process is really great. I’ve done a bit with design processes, but what i really like about it from a data perspective is that people aren’t really getting tied to ideas. We force them to think broadly and move quickly. I love seeing the leveraging of other people’s ideas. And I really think from a data perspective about how you can evaluate impact.

Amia Foston

Former Strategic Impact + Research Officer, Lumina Foundation

See Our Full List of Partners

League for Innovation in the Community College
Lumina Foundation
Miami Dade College
Michael and Susan Dell Foundation
Michigan Colleges
Minnesota State IT Center of Excellence
Monroe Community College
Northern Illinois University
Northern Virginia Community College
Pima Community College
San Antonio Works
Township High School District 211
U.S. Department of Education
United Negro College Fund (UNCF)
University of Maine System
University of North Texas
Virginia Western Community College
Walmart
Western Governors University

Interested in working with us?

To get in touch, please email us at connect@eddesignlab.org or fill out the contact form linked below with any business inquiries and we will get back to you shortly!

Get in Touch