The Technology Enhanced Learning team were tasked with running a team afternoon for the Academic Development Directorate under the title of “Embracing the Digital”.
After initial discussions we decided to take some inspiration from the Stanford 2025 project, described as “an exploration of undergraduate experiences in the future”. On their website they have a toolkit made up of three pieces; titled Reflect, Imagine and Try. The TEL team decided to further tailor these to the directorate and UK higher education using JISC’s Co-Design consultation 2016-17. This is a set of visions of how technology will transform research and education by 2020-2030, a time frame that aligned with the project at Stanford. As the Directorate is made up of teaching & learning and research specialists we selected six relevant visions across both areas to be the focus of our YSJ Embracing the Digital toolkit.
The first part of the toolkit, Reflect, started with staff thinking about the university of the future; they were transported to 2025 and had to sketch what they saw in the future vision of YSJ. This lead onto selecting a defining characteristic of the university of the future and thinking about how the students will differ or be similar to present day students. Some of the thoughts that came from this warm up activity where around how students in the future may learn (will it be wholly or partly online), where will the learning take place (will it all be on campus) and when will the learning take place.
The second activity, Imagine, involved using prompt cards to help spark new directions for initiatives and projects. It was two step process:
- If you are working on a project, answer the following about your project on a piece of paper:
- What are you trying to accomplish?
- Who is it for?
- Why is it important?
- Choose a card from the deck and combine the prompt on the card with your project context to generate new ideas.
The final activity in the toolkit, Try, gave ADD a chance to create something, using the ideas generated from the Imagine activity they could evolve, iterate or expand it using some activity cards. They could create; a two minute video, timeline, storyboard, sketch, news headline, a physical representation, act out a scene or a comic strip. This activity revealed there is some real creativity in ADD!
Emma