Work in progress: Using Community-Based Participatory Design and a Context Canvas to design engineering design courses

In a world of open knowledge, engineering students expect from an educational program to provide practical experiences in order to get ready for the job market. Hence, design experiences, as a learning experience, are crucial for student growth, retention and engagement. Therefore, it is important to create innovative learning experiences that satisfy the achievement of these goals. In addition, such experiences need to be feasible for implementation and viable for the designer of learning - the educator. In fact, developing a design learning experience is a design task itself. Educators need to understand the student and the context in which the learning takes place in order to develop an innovative concept of a design activity. The overall purpose of introducing the context in the design endeavor is to create better solutions that suit all stakeholders but more importantly promotes inclusiveness, diversity, and equity in education by putting the student at the center of solution development. Additionally, innovation requires putting together different perspectives and knowledge. Therefore, co-designing with stakeholders is a way to spark this innovation. In this paper, we introduce the Context Canvas as a collaborative design tool to help consider the contextual factors early in the process of design learning experience development. This work in progress paper presents an example of use of the Context Canvas for redesigning a project spine course in the engineering program at our institution.