Postsecondary Education: Behavioral Design
Training & Capacity Building

ideas42’s postsecondary education team offers multiple programs, all designed to help college and non-profit professionals—those who know their students and school contexts best—improve student outcomes by using a behavioral lens. Offerings range from short classes to months-long design sprints, and are ideal for college success professionals who want to incorporate lessons from behavioral science in their own work.

Don’t see an offering you are interested in below? Contact us at education@ideas42.org to see how we can build a custom offering for your team!

Crash Course

Behavioral Science Applications in Postsecondary Education

This short course introduces participants to applied behavioral design and some of the most common behavioral barriers students face. Sessions will cover:

  • The behavioral approach to problem solving

  • An introduction to some common behavioral barriers faced by students

  • How to map common behavioral barriers faced by students to a set of design principles that help focus attention, build intention, and facilitate action

 

 

Program details

  • Length: 4 hours (across one or two sessions)

  • Format: Zoom or in-person

  • Content: Mix of presentation and hands-on activities

  • Capacity: Up to 40 participants per course

Interesting in this offering?

Email education@ideas42.org to request more information, inquire about pricing, or discuss how to customize this for your team.

 

 

Communications Workshop

Behaviorally-Informed Strategies for Student Engagement

This course is designed to help school administrators develop behaviorally-informed communications campaigns (using emails, text messages, etc.) to drive student engagement and follow-through on key tasks. Participants will walk away with a campaign to send to students (reviewed and edited by ideas42), as well as knowledge of how to build additional campaigns in the future. Sessions will cover:

  • The behavioral approach to problem solving

  • Best practices for sending behaviorally-informed communications

  • Applying the lessons in practice: drafting behaviorally-informed communications

  • Measuring the impact of your communications efforts

Program details

  • Length: 4 hours (across one or two sessions)

  • Format: Zoom or in-person

  • Content: Mix of presentation and hands-on activities, plus personal feedback on your communications campaign from ideas42

  • Capacity: Up to 20 participants per course

Interesting in this offering?

Email education@ideas42.org to request more information, inquire about pricing, or discuss how to customize this for your team.

Design Intensive

A Behavioral Approach for Optimizing Programs, Systems, and Processes

This course is designed to help postsecondary education professionals identify the outcomes they want to help students achieve, explore behavioral barriers that can hold them back, and think through design solutions to overcome the challenges identified. Sessions will cover:

  • The behavioral approach to problem solving

  • Identifying problems for behavioral design

  • Diagnosing behavioral barriers

  • Engineering behavioral solutions

The Design Intensive is best-suited for a school or organizational team—or cohort of organizations—working on a similar student success goal (i.e., boosting adult enrollment, increasing uptake of tutoring services, connecting students with advisors, etc.).

Program details

  • Length: 10 hours (typically five two-hour sessions)

  • Format: Zoom or in-person

  • Content: Mix of presentation and hands-on activities, plus feedback from ideas42 between sessions on how to strengthen your work

  • Capacity: Flexible (if multiple organizations are participating, 2-10 participants per organization)

Interesting in this offering?

Email education@ideas42.org to request more information, inquire about pricing, or discuss how to customize this for your team.

Guided Sprint

Developing Custom Behavioral Solutions for Student Success

This is an interactive semester-long engagement in which ideas42 will guide your team through a hands-on application of our behavioral diagnosis and design process to a problem that you identify. We will meet weekly to collectively:

  • Identify the key outcomes you want to help students achieve

  • Diagnose behavioral barriers that are holding students back

  • Design an intervention you can implement to help students overcome those barriers

The Guided Sprint is designed for teams of higher education professionals who are working together to promote student success (i.e., a financial aid team, a student success team, an admissions team, etc.) and who wish to collaborate intensively with ideas42 to optimize or develop a student success intervention.

Program details

  • Length: 12 one-hour sessions held weekly over 3-4 months

  • Format: Zoom or in-person

  • Content: Guided conversations and activities, with occasional work to complete on your own between sessions

  • Capacity: 3-6 participants per team

Interesting in this offering?

Email education@ideas42.org to request more information, inquire about pricing, or discuss how to customize this for your team.