Design Thinking & Innovation

Innovation Incubator — How Might We Stimulate and Support Faculty Innovation in Teaching with Technologies?

Background

In 2018, David Brown and I were ideating on how we might support sustainable innovations among the faculty in the way they teach with technologies. We realized that if this was a lasting change, it would likely take several years attract faculty members to come together across disciplines, and to create ideas, iterate on them, and test them. We knew we would need to provide financial resources as well as people to help support them as they explored their ideas.

Action

My role was to provide overall leadership and budget management for this project, which we dubbed the Innovation Incubator. We planned and budgeted for three years of support for up to 30 faculty members. We asked our four-person staff to commit a portion of their time to support a group of faculty members. Instead of a traditional call for proposals, which would reward individual contributions; we created a call for faculty members to submit one-page statements of interest, which we used to identify scholars of similar interests. We received over 30 statements and found that they fell into four thematic groups. We assigned each faculty member to one of those four groups. We held a meeting to allow the participants to meet within their groups to see if they might be interested in collaborating with one another. Twenty-two faculty members were open to working together on a project under the theme, and we assigned one staff member to each group.

Results

Four teams were formed: the Collaborative to Advance Multi-modal Participatory Publishing, the Inclusive Data Science group, the Metacognition and Well Being group, and the Student Success group. The incubator project is still underway. One early success is the Inclusive Data Science group created a cross-disciplinary course: Introduction to Data Science. Any undergraduate student can take this experiential course, which is team-taught by one scientist and one humanist. The National Science Foundation recently awarded this team $300,000 to develop and assess new approaches to teaching data science that integrate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and humanities disciplines.

Another early success is the Student Success team, which has led efforts to support faculty members in using role playing and gamification (strategies for designing games to enhance educational experiences for students). Because so many courses have become more technologically mediated during the COVID-19 pandemic, this has piqued the interest of teachers to see if they might leverage the technologies to deliver game-like experiences. This group received a grant from the President’s Fund for the Humanities, which will help them promote the Reacting to the Past (RTTP) gamification method in humanities classes. This team hosted a Spring, 2022, regional conference on RTTP as well.

University of Colorado Natural History Museum Design Challenge — How Might We Create an Exhibit Illustrating Symbiotic Relationships in Nature?

Background

In 2017, Rebecca Coon and Sharon Tinianow from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Natural History Museum asked Courtney Fell and me to facilitate a design challenge with museum stakeholders to brainstorm and prototype a user experience that would demonstrate three symbiotic relationships found in nature: commensalism (one organism benefits from the other without harming it), mutualism (organisms help one another), and parassitism (one organism benefits while another is harmed).

Action

We held a three-hour design challenge with participants from CU Boulder’s Department of Theatre & Dance, the CU Art Museum, CU South Denver’s Museum, and the City of Lafayette, Colorado. We asked them to conduct a homework assignment ahead of time to prompt them to think generatively. On the day of our event, three museum staff members presented stories to the participants, which were related to the three types of relationships. Participants interacted with the staff to learn more about these relationships. Participants were then asked to select one of the relationships, and to brainstorm ideas for exhibits that might illustrate those relationships. Next, they prototyped what an exhibit might look like.

Results

Stakeholders were able to present to the entire group their prototype ideas and enter into a discussion about them. Museum staff reported they thought the experience was very successful. They left the session with many concrete ideas for their exhibit, and they created the exhibit, which was available on the Boulder campus first and then at the CU South campus later.