Priorities:University of North Carolina Student Priorities
Revision as of 14:52, 27 September 2014 by 66.57.63.145 (talk)
Contents
Overview
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has many opportunities for students to get involved with innovations around campus. In researching these opportunities, it became apparent that it would be an impossible task to catalog them all. What was also apparent was that without exception these opportunities were not being spurred by a central mandate, but arising as needed from all of the individual schools and programs. The opportunity on this campus is to work on bringing all of those opportunities together in a way that is easy for potential students and investors to locate. Additional work should also be done in lowering existing barriers to innovation in all disciplines, and connecting the University more formally to the resources of surrounding universities and the Research Triangle Park (RTP).
The Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship has worked closely with the Chancellor to design a roadmap for innovation at our campus. The roadmap was holistic in its reach and incorporated a great deal of student feedback, making it easy to fit tactics into the university's overall vision (Innovate@Carolina Roadmap). The roadmap aligned five key recommendations for the campus:
- Prepare faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, staff, and the broader Carolina community with the knowledge, skills, and connections necessary to translate new ideas into innovations
- Catalyze innovation at Carolina by facilitating the work of faculty, staff, and students as they put important ideas to use for a better world
- Translate important new ideas more expediently and at an increased volume into innovations that improve society
- Align people, incentives, resources, and processes to strengthen an intentional culture of innovation at Carolina
- Catalyze innovation at Carolina by facilitating the work of faculty, staff, and students as they put important ideas to use for a better world
Strategy #1: Prepare faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, staff, and the broader Carolina community with the knowledge, skills, and connections necessary to translate new ideas into innovations.
Tactic #1 (write your projects here):
Tactic #2:
Tactic #example.
- Description: The opportunity to take a Creative Inquiry is built into the current curriculum for undergraduates. However, within Bioengineering, these "electives" are limited to research focused classes such as Orthopaedics, Cardiovascular, BioSensors, etc. These courses are limited to those who wish to strive to take what they develop in their research laboratories or in their dorm rooms to market where it can serve the purpose it was created for. Therefore, we will be implementing a Creative Inquiry known as The DEN that span topics within I&E as a separate sector from which undergraduates can currently select. Examples of such include: Opportunity Assessment and Project Management, Start-Up Business Models, Start-Up Finance and Investment, and Product Development and Management. In addition to a Creative Inquiry weekly meeting, teams of undergraduates will enter The DEN with technologies they are passionate about developing into ventures and will apply the I&E topics to those technologies. Established entrepreneurs, technology transfer officers, and venture capitalists will guest lecture to these students to spark interest and highlight the opportunity of a career in this space.
- Team Leader(s): Breanne Przestrzelski, Sarah Helms (current BioE Master's candidate), Colin Burns-Heffner (current BioE Master's candidate), Natalie Patzin (current Bioengineering Advisory Board President), and Martine LaBerge (current Bioengineering Department Head)
- Milestones:
- Curriculum Assessment- completed with undergraduate student services coordinator (Tammy Rothell)- November 2013
- Preparation of Audience- completed with help from Martine LaBerge (current Bioengineering Department Head)- December 2013
- Curriculum Preparation- January 2014
- Full Acceptance into Undergraduate Program-Spring 2014
Strategy #2: Catalyze innovation at Carolina by facilitating the work of faculty, staff, and students as they put important ideas to use for a better world.
Tactic #1 (write your projects here):
- Description: The opportunity for graduate and professional students to collaborate is limited. The current opportunities exist outside the scope of the normal experience for these students, either in co-curricular activities or self-initiated discovery. The main purpose of interdisciplinary electives is to teach the steps that everyone has in common, such as patient safety or simulation. These experiences are extremely valuable, although only open to a small set of students and highly structured based on common experiences among students, We have learned through past experiences in problem-based learning that too much direction is equally as detrimental as not enough. It is our opinion that the curricula of graduate and professional schools is overly structured, and there are an overwhelming number of negative incentives in place to collaborating with other disciplines and professions. There is also no dedicated space to open and deliberative sharing of ideas between the professions that draws students together. It is the hypothesis of this project that the creation of a self-directed learning space that is available, accessible, and approachable by students in the health professions and graduate programs will be able to serve as a catalyst for solving complex multidisciplinary problems in the related fields.
- Team Leader: Alex Sherman
- Milestones:
- Environmental scan: Fall 2014
- Small meetings with stakeholders in each school: Fall 2014
- On-boarding and selection of development team: Fall 2014
- Development of a project plan for creation of a joint space: Fall 2014
- Proposal of project plan to stakeholders: Winter 2014
- Implementation of joint space plan into new building development: Spring 2014
- Formation of a joint, interprofessional, interdisciplinary, collaborative space: Fall 2015
- Expected Activities in the Space:
- The space will act as both a self-organized learning environment (SOLE) for graduate and professional students and a place for group work and projects between those students
- Activities may include:
- Facilitated discussions around topic catalysts related to problems in healthcare delivery
- Reverse pitches from subject matter experts about problems in their fields of expertise
- Rationale:
- Bringing people together for the sake of bringing people together, with the simple intent of promoting open curiosity and inquiry, is a powerful tool for tackling complicated problems. This ability is currently unavailable across many professional and graduate school programs.