Indiana University Bloomington’s Instructional Systems Technology (IST) program is essentially the "MIT of learning design." Ranked #1 in the nation, its entire philosophy is built on Human Performance Technology (HPT)—the science of analyzing an organization's broad goals, identifying exactly why people behave the way they do, and building systemic interventions to change that behavior.
For a global project like your Empathy Movement training curriculum, an IST team won't just write text slides. They will look at the entire ecosystem of how a person transitions from a beginner to a master facilitator of Empathy and Active Listening and engineer a repeatable, data-driven learning model.
Unlike programs that only teach students how to build standalone e-learning modules, Indiana University trains its graduate students to think like organizational architects.
The Master’s Studio: Residential M.S.Ed. students spend a full year working inside a dedicated "Studio" environment under faculty mentorship. They form teams to act as professional consulting agencies for real-world clients.
The Adult Learning Focus: Because their curriculum heavily emphasizes cognitive psychology and how adults adopt new, deeply ingrained social habits, they excel at training "soft skills" like empathy, negotiation, and dialogue facilitation.
Rooted in Evaluation: An IU-designed curriculum is highly structured, mapping precise learning objectives directly to performance outcomes so you can mathematically measure if the training is working.
To get an IST graduate team or individual intern assigned to the Empathy Movement, you need to understand their core academic structure and align your project with specific courses.
1. Target the Right Course Pipelines
Your project fits perfectly into three distinct graduate-level paths:
The Yearlong M.S.Ed. Studio Project: This is the gold standard. Student teams take a massive project from initial analysis through prototype design and user testing.
EDUC-R 586 (Practicum in IST): A course where individual masters or doctoral students must complete a hands-on instructional project for an external organization.
EDUC-R 686 (Internship in IST): An advanced, supervised field experience where a student embeds deeply with a client to solve complex learning architectural problems.
2. Submit a System-Centered Project Brief
When pitching to the department chair (Dr. Thomas Brush) or faculty members, frame your needs around performance systems rather than just "content creation."
Instead of saying, "We need someone to write an online course about empathy," you should say:
"We need an IST team to conduct a front-end task analysis on our five-part empathy model, map a modular curriculum blueprint that scales globally, and design the peer-to-peer feedback and evaluation loops required to certify Master Facilitators in Active Listening."
3. Offer a "Live Sandbox" Environment
Universities love clients who are responsive and possess rich raw materials. You can secure a competitive spot in their project pipeline by promising:
SME Availability: Guaranteeing that you and your team will act as accessible Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to answer their design questions.
Rich Practice Data: Letting them analyze your existing training videos, transcripts, and marathon listening session data to find performance gaps.
A Real Audience: Providing a live, eager base of global community volunteers who can act as the alpha and beta testers for the modules they design.
[ STEP 1: Mid-Summer Outreach ] ──► Send a formal design brief to istdept@iu.edu and Dr. Thomas Brush.
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[ STEP 2: Faculty Scoping ] ──► Schedule a 15-minute call to match the brief to Fall or Spring courses.
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[ STEP 3: Student Onboarding ] ──► Provide raw training assets and establish weekly feedback loops.
By pitching to Indiana University, you are looking to secure the architects who will lay the structural, psychological foundation for your global training. Once they build the high-level behavioral blueprint, you can pass it to creative artists to make it visually stunning.