This spring, Harvard undergraduates Ashton Body and Aimee Ramirez planned and designed student workshops at GHELI to foster a creative space for students to think about their final projects for Faculty Director Sue J. Goldie’s course, World Health: Challenges and Opportunities. In their final projects, students are charged with analyzing a societal health challenge they are passionate about and with creating a “real world” product to influence policy or motivate change.
Having created their own exemplar projects for the courses the year before, Body and Ramirez were well-positioned to share their insights with students. Working with GHELI’s Sr. Instructional Design Specialist Nina Bhattacharya, Body and Ramirez also helped develop course materials, including a homework assignment and a section guide.
Body and Ramirez recently visited the GHELI studio to reflect on their experiences planning and developing course materials– sharing their thoughts on the design process, facilitating a workshop, collaborating with each other, and lessons learned.
“The work that we did here is really supposed to inspire a love for learning again,” Ramirez shared. “We wanted to get people excited about the project, excited about the assignments, excited about PSAs. Wanting to learn.”
“It was really cool to understand how much intentionality goes behind every little piece [of creating course materials], even in the phrasing of questions,” Body said. “Being able to be on the backside of [the process] and learn more about how it happens was so insightful.”