What is your project about?
My project seeks to come up with innovative ideas to shape the future of education at the School of Business and Economics. The Impact Lab is a co-creation platform where students, teachers, and staff can develop ideas, which are mostly themed around Active Blended Learning, to implement into our faculty. Members can share their ideas, such as new support tools that we might need or how to use ABL to create social connections between students, which is something we lacked during the pandemic. Impact Lab is the platform but also the people behind it: My goal is to build a co-creation community for education in our faculty.
What stage are you currently in?
Because our funding began in September, we are currently in the setup and launch phase. We are establishing the platform's foundation while also attempting to gain an understanding of the various stakeholders at our faculty. This entails determining what types of educational issues we want to tackle. There is a lot to consider in terms of where we want to direct the platform's efforts in the coming months. We begin by asking people what they are interested in and what they think should be improved at our faculty, as the project is designed to generate ideas from the bottom up rather than the top down. We are also meeting with various student organizations, and a number of program directors and staff. We ask them what problems and challenges they have faced or are currently facing that our community could help them solve.
How can students collaborate?
We have some paid positions for which students can apply, but they are limited. This project also offers the opportunity for a thesis internship, in which students can conduct research on the platform. Otherwise, for students who want to be especially active on the platform, we have two roles that they can take on. The ‘champion’ is an owner of a challenge on the platform and facilitates implementation. The ‘influencer’ stays up-to-date and provides plenty of feedback while inspiring ideation among the community.
However, students can also be ‘contributors’ of ideas and are not required to know anything about education. Once you register on the platform, you can easily post your idea. Your post is then visible to anyone on the platform. People can like or comment on contributions, similar to how a social media platform works with comments and reactions. After about 8 weeks of sharing contributions on the platform, a group of students, teachers, and staff will sit together and evaluate the ideas and implement the best ones. Students whose ideas get chosen will also get a reward. Of course, the student with the top idea gets to participate in the implementation of it.
What type of contributions are you looking for?
Previous research has shown that just because something is a good educational option does not guarantee that it will work in your educational setting. At SBE, we have a lot of large courses. What works in classes of 600 students is not the same as what works in classes of 70 students. Therefore, we are looking for context-sensitive solutions. With the experience of remote and hybrid education, we have learned about so many options since the pandemic. This project's timing is critical because it is attempting to facilitate the return to in-person education supported by active blended learning.
We seek to do this through any insight or experience that students, teachers, or staff have had. If students share things that help them in various areas concerning their learning experience, it helps us start projects while considering the student perspective. The Impact Lab is not about applying the perfect educational theory or pedagogical approach – it is about finding what works best for the VU SBE community by consulting its members.
What was your inspiration for the Impact Lab?
My main inspiration was teaching and its challenges during the pandemic. My research was also a source of inspiration for me: I conduct research on how digital technologies support new forms of collaborative innovation. For 10 years, I studied how organizations that want to improve industry sustainability use co-creation platforms to collaborate across boundaries involving non-profit and business organizations. I have previously coordinated one of the SBE’s bachelor programmes, so the school was a perfect setting to implement it.
How did you feel when you won the fellowship?
I felt so excited. My colleague called me on the phone right away, everyone was congratulating me. Getting a grant always feels great as an academic because it helps us continue to do the things we care about, so to have the opportunity to develop a project that I care about is very nice. It is also nice to be able to do it right here, with my colleagues. It builds on 10 years of experience. We piloted it already so I had a lot of confidence in the solution I was proposing.
How will the project develop in the future?
The plan is to develop a blueprint for other universities in the Netherlands to be able to offer challenge driven co-creation platforms for various initiatives where they would like to widely involve students, teachers, and staff. There are many different arenas where this might be interesting, such as a vision for the whole university on how to make campus more sustainable. We can build connections between students, teachers, and stakeholders that do not exist in our day-to-day world. Thinking even bigger, we want to offer this to societal organizations who want to work with universities and citizens on various local improvement topics, such as sustainability or healthcare in the region.
How has the feedback by students been?
We evaluated the pilot and received more responses from staff and teachers; we are now collecting additional input from students. However, the students whose ideas were implemented were happy to continue working with teachers on piloting their ideas. Overall, we think that students may be more motivated to contribute to broader topics such as making the VU campus more social than purely educational topics.
What are you proud of?
I am proud of the Impact Lab team. We have worked hard to build on the pilot and to improve our approach. Thankfully this grant helps us to better engage with the SBE community, whose members have great ideas to share and we are proud to play a role in supporting those ideas to get implemented and make a positive impact.
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