Case Study: LIS’s new programme development
How The London Interdisciplinary School is building on what they learned opening a challenger university to develop an alternative to the MBA.
👋 Happy New Year! We’re back, and will be regularly sharing more EdTech insights. We’re kicking off the new year with a fascinating case study close to my own heart, from the UK challenger university, the London Interdisciplinary School.
We’ve also got a couple of great meet ups in January - come along!
Marion is signing up folks for the next cohort of her course Designing Learning as a Product. And I’m working on a new format for my programme on Finding Product-Market Fit in EdTech: get a sneak preview here.
“Learning has to fit with people's lives. It has to be something they will actually engage with,” says Amelia Peterson. “You feel like you're adapting for purely practical concerns. But it is the absolute first barrier that anything has to overcome. Will people give the programme their attention and the time necessary to learn something?”
Amelia, who was The London Interdisciplinary School’s (LIS) Head of Learning and Teaching has recently been appointed Programme Director for their new professional degree programme.
It will join their innovative Bachelors of Arts and Science (BASc) and Masters of Arts and Science (MASc) programmes in Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods and provide a welcome alternative to the popular but arguably tired MBA.
“The new degree focuses on what we describe as ‘grasping a shifting external terrain’,” explains Amelia. “Being able to make sense of the big shifts in energy, intelligence, ecosystems, trust, complexity and longevity.”
Amelia had taken time today to reflect on the journey of building a new institution, LIS’s first undergraduate degree and the learnings that she is now applying to developing LIS’s new programme. Along the way we’ll also touch on the impacts of AI on what you teach and how you assess.
Joining a new institution
Amelia spent five years at The Innovation Unit, then became a Teaching Fellow at LSE, before joining LIS in 2019, two years ahead of opening to its first students.
She remembers her reaction to first hearing about the project to found a new university, which along with The Dyson Institute and TEDI were the first new UK institutions to be created since the late 1960s.
“The idea of an institution that was set up to create degrees focused on tackling complex problems, drawing from across all the arts and sciences… that immediately made sense and was very appealing,” she remembers.
She knew of LIS’ founder Ed Fidoe and his previous project, School 21, a new school based in Newham in East London. “He had created a flourishing school with a very distinctive ethos of ‘head, heart and hand’. So I felt confident in that track record.”
She also knew of Carl Gombrich, who set up the interdisciplinary BASc degree at UCL and had joined LIS to lead the faculty. “A friend's daughter had done the UCL BASc degree and was very impressed.”
Along with 600 others, she applied to become one of the founding faculty. “They made us create short videos about concepts that we cared about, which I thought was a cool step in the interview process.”
I ask what was appealing about the opportunity? “The idea of going somewhere where the focus was on teaching was exciting,” she says, noting frustration about Universities’ impact primarily being judged on research.
“On that first interview day, it just seemed like a really dynamic group of people. It was so different to sit down next to people who had backgrounds in biochemistry and physics and contemporary art and anthropology. I was immediately very taken with that prospect.”
She, along with ten others were hired and they got down to work.
BASc development and opening
The format of the curriculum was already established. It would be based around problems and methods, with each being taught separately. This, she says, felt very sensible.
“I'd seen from working with project based learning previously, the challenges of trying to teach everything through projects. So the idea that we would teach some things through the problem modules and other things through distinct standalone methods modules to build particular skills in quantitative and qualitative methods made sense.”
The faculty joined in late 2019, with the aim to begin teaching in September 2020. Then Covid-19 closed universities and the process with the regulator to acquire provisional degree awarding powers stalled. “The QAA were figuring out as we went along how much information was needed to feel confident about setting up an institution for the first time.”
The decision was taken to push back opening by a year. The new faculty were switched to fractional contracts and she remained teaching at LSE.
Despite the frustrating delay, she believes that the extra time gave them more time to develop and strengthen the curriculum. Key to this was running something they called ‘The Sprint’ in January 2021, all delivered online, due to Covid restrictions.
“It was two sets of five weeks, where we had students testing out the first weeks of curricula. And we did a few other short online courses over that time to try things out.”
Then, finally, in September 2021, they opened to their first students.
The new professional degree
During the extra year, they had also agreed with the regulator to extend their license to cover masters degrees. They launched the ‘MASc’ in 2022 in a full-time campus mode. Then in 2023, they added a part-time, ‘remote-first’ mode.
They also experimented with a range of short programmes to discover where else LIS had the potential to play.
A space where they found particular appetite and traction was for a leadership programme on Cross-functional Leadership, which they run with both open cohorts as well as organisations like the NHS.
This period of experimentation led to the key insight that the appeal of LIS was its breadth and this interest extended to people at different career stages. And that it was uniquely placed to be able to offer an innovative accredited degree in leadership.
“I'd always been interested in LIS having a more professionally oriented degree, as well as a more theoretical research oriented one,” says Amelia. “Our belief is that there's important knowledge in the abstract arts and sciences disciplines that needs to be brought into the applied space of industry.”
Their conceptual starting point was the MBA. “It's the most widely pursued sort of professional degree out there for people who are looking to go into management and leadership roles,” says Amelia. “Our mission as an organisation has always been about helping people learn how to tackle complex problems. And some of the people best positioned to do that are in leadership and management positions.”
But the programme will very much be an alternative to the MBA.
“The challenge is of all of the knowledge, tools and methods out there, which are the ones that we most want to introduce into the business world?” she says.
To create focus, they decided that the unifying idea should be complexity.
“The notion of complexity has sort of been around since the early 20th century,” she explains. “And the idea of thinking about organisations in terms of kind of complex systems, has also been around for a long time.”
“But we haven't previously had the methods to model complexity and understand things in the social and management world. That's really changed in the last 10 years. Now is the moment to introduce a program focused around complexity. Not just as a metaphor and something to think with, but as something that comes with its own toolkit.”
The first cohort will start in January 2026.
Discovery interviews and workshop
Whilst developing the initial programme concept, the team set out to conduct research. The goal was to get clarity on the audience and their unmet needs, to inform both the curriculum and the learner experience.
“We've been having conversations with different people, including academics and practitioners,” says Amelia. “We've run a survey, conducted interviews and organised a couple of design days where we've brought people in and got them to work through bits of the curriculum to bring in new angles. Overall, we've had feedback from around 200 people.”
So what have the big discoveries been through that process?
“Many of the ‘a-ha’ moments are about dissonance,” she reckons. “This is a challenge when designing any kind of educational program.”
“You're always going to have very different views on what's needed. You've got the people who are going to do the program. And then you've got the people they are engaging with: employers, managers or the people that they're going to be working with in the future. For undergrads, there’s also their parents. There's not one set of needs.”
She says that it’s also highlighted the challenge of there being multiple time horizons at play. “You've got people who are thinking about the challenges they're dealing with on a daily basis. What are the things that are going to help them make sense of the complexity and make immediate decisions?”
“And then you've got people who are realising that they are going to have a career that is maybe 10 to 15 years longer than they originally thought. Their sector and its focus might also be changing massively. They’ve got a different sort of workforce coming through, who are potentially generationally and culturally different. They want to prepare themselves for those challenges over a longer time span.”
This has led them to think carefully about how to design a programme that includes concepts and tools that are immediately useful for people to make sense of things on a daily basis but also the longer term, bigger picture.
“And to help them understand where they want to fit into this rapidly changing world,” adds Amelia.
Identifying the target learner and unmet needs
The process has helped them to get very clear about their target learners. These are people who are at a stage in their career where they already have responsibility, often significant responsibility.
“They've reached a point where they might be managing lots of people but they still have a good chunk of their career left and perhaps, haven't yet decided how they really want to leave their mark,” she says.
“In a lot of the research conversations, we realised there was a group of people who had considered MBAs in their late 20s, but hadn't been drawn to the existing curriculum. And they feel like they haven't had the opportunity to step back and create the space for an injection of new knowledge that doing a longer term degree can provide.”
They’ve seen some interest from businesses, unenthused by what the traditional MBA offers. But to begin with, they are targeting individuals. “They are more likely to be prepared to go out on a limb and try something new.”
This clarity on target audience has also had a significant impact on how they are thinking about the form the degree will take. Flexibility is key.
“Once we realised that these are people who are a bit further in their lives, who probably have other commitments, whether that's mortgages or family and probably don't want to step out of that for a year, we knew that it needed to be something that can fit around their lives,” she says.
However, they also know that they can’t deliver the experience completely online. “The kind of change you want people to go through does require people to come together and have proper space and time to engage with the material and with each other. This insight has led us to a low residency model.”
The plan for the programme is to deliver it part-time over two years, mainly online but where the cohort comes together in person several times a year for a number of days.
Learning from delivering short programmes
Their short programme on Cross-functional Leadership has also helped provide insights that inform the new programme design.
“We learnt about the kind of material that people can make sense of and metabolise in the context of a full-time job,” says Amelia. “Cross-functional Leadership is taught through 90 minute virtual sessions and full days on site. Those are units of time that people can fit into their schedules fairly well. They will be the basic building block of this larger degree.”
She says that Cross-Functional Leadership and their original Sprint have been incredibly useful to understand how people practically engage. “You get a real sense of what it is like to be with the kind of people that we're going to be teaching long term. You don't just get stuck trying to design on a sheet of paper.”
However, she says that it’s important to do this repeatedly with multiple groups if you can. “There is a risk that you over-optimise the programme for a few really strong characters. Everybody can get drawn to certain participants and then you can find yourself sort of thinking : ‘What would work really well for them?’ You've got to remember you're going to have many different kinds of people in the future.”
The other thing that is hard to test is how it builds over time. “We can see how people make connections across the different sessions. And on our final day of the program, we now put quite a lot of emphasis on integrating different parts of what they've learned. But what we're trying to think about is how does that scale when you're not just doing it across five sessions, but when you're integrating across six big modules?”
Experience design
Amelia reflects that understanding the context of your target learner and the interplay between this and what you want to teach is key to designing educational experiences.
“For example, timing: when in the day do you schedule something? Are you trying to schedule it so that everybody can be together and can have the benefit of engaging across a larger group? Or do you go for smaller things so that people can kind of optimally fit it into their day and they can have a more intense, intimate discussion?”
She says that these questions become really significant for people's ability to engage with a program, because it has to fit with the rest of their lives. “It also has to fit with the kind of material that you're teaching. You have to give people enough space to make sense of something, but you don't also want to drag something out.”
To do this well, requires ongoing discovery and iteration: “It's a constant process to figure out who your model user is and get a sense of what's going to work best for them.”
She reflects that this is where the design for this programme needs to be quite different from the undergraduate degree, which she describes as rich but not always coherent. “Incoherence can be a positive and a necessary thing when you're dealing with interdisciplinarity. Some things just don't fit together. When you're an undergraduate, that’s the right time to sort of grapple with some of that.”
But she thinks the challenge is different for more mature learners, studying alongside work. “Asking them to sit with a lot of conflict and uncertainty in the ideas they're dealing with is not going to be tenable. There has to be a much clearer sense from the start of how things fit together and the logic behind everything.”
Building personal knowledge bases
The programme is being designed as the world grapples with the emergence of generative AI. This has helped them think more clearly about the underlying philosophy behind their teaching model.
“We've talked for a long time at LIS about helping people to visualise what they're learning. How they're connecting it together,” Amelia says.
“The range and pace at which people are now being asked to work, if you don't build a knowledge base for yourself, you’ll end up relying on ChatGPT (or insert other Large Language Model). You will be expected to be able to find knowledge so quickly.”
“If we're all just relying on the same LLMs for our quick response to ‘What do I know about energy transitions’ or, ‘What do I know about innovation ecosystems’... everybody's going to be ending up with the same crunched knowledge, where everything is normalised and flat. But if you've got your own personal version, there's space for the more distinctive and potentially more valuable kinds of connections and insights.”
Again, observing students’ current behaviour has informed her thinking. “I've always been curious about what kind of tools our masters and undergraduate students use to do this. To what extent people do use something or don't? There is an activity of building a ‘second brain’, that is not yet considered enough as core to the educational process.”
Assessing process not artefacts
This combined with the challenges AI presents for traditional essays is also leading them to think differently about assessment. Instead of assessing students on the output they create, they are increasingly thinking about assessing their capabilities in more direct ways.
“That's a shift that we can make even more with this program,” she says. “I don't want to be asking professionals to write snazzy consulting reports for the sake of it. They might occasionally have to do things for external audiences when there's a real purpose. But the main outcome we want is to see how you're organising and critically engaging with this growing knowledge base that you're creating. And we should assess that in the most direct way possible by getting people to explain their choices about why they're developing it in a certain way, and making sure that it's really usable and useful for them.”
Summary
We reflect on the learnings that might be useful to others designing educational programmes.
Get a deep understanding of who your participants are and what they need by doing discovery interviews and running shorter programmes first. Avoid over-optimising for specific students by doing this several times, with lots of participants.
Allow yourself to be led by feedback. But don’t lose sight of the initial reasoning that resonated about the program. Form can impact content.
Make sure that the programme fits with people’s lives. This is the first barrier to overcome for them to learn something.
Ultimately, it’s about keeping two things in balance: a compelling vision with the practical insights about what will work for learners.
“When you're working intensely on something and going through several iterations, you can easily end up with a version where you’ve completely lost what initially resonated,” she says “Don't let yourself get bored by telling that same story again and again.”
But at the same time, “It should get refined and you want to be open to feedback. Education content and form are so intertwined. Engaging with learners really made me more attuned to people having to work harder now than they ever had before because of the cost of living. Fitting learning alongside everything else is more and more difficult.”
She concludes: “Ultimately you have to ask why is this worth someone's time and for them to give this their attention? Can this fit alongside the other things that they have to do?”
Disclosure: I was fractional Chief Product Officer for LIS from Sept 2022 - Dec 2023 and played a significant role in launching the Cross-functional Leadership programme, hybrid Masters and establishing LIS’s new strategic direction including the MBA challenger.
If you’re interested in strategic product support, do get in touch.
Find out more about the group, one-to-one and team coaching I offer here.