Priorities:Universidad Católica del Uruguay Faculty Projects
Contents
Project Name Design thinking customized to your college career
Project by Faculty Innovation Fellows Candidate Maria Noel Ferrer
Why is this project important to you, your department, & your Fellows?
Nowadays the development of the entrepreneurial spirit in students is a key value in the strategic plan of the school and it is mandatory that career plans include courses about I&E. However we are still far away of this objective, in most careers it is only offered as optionally, as an elective course or within the entrepreneurship minor.
Description
The project consists of replicating a Legal Design Thinking model course dictated in the Lawyer career, in all the other careers offered by the school. This means to implement a mandatory course or workshop in all the careers, in which the students are challenged to rethink and redesign a process with a problem or opportunity to improve the practice of their profession.
This challenge is launched with an interview or conference of professionals in the field and they, through design thinking, develop hypotheses, ideas and prototypes that solve the professionals' problems. This methodology exists only in Lawyer Career but It is considered a success story in terms of developing innovative thinking in students.
As the Ithaka center would not have the infrastructure or people to offer enough teachers of these courses in all the careers offered by the university, the proposal would be to work together with Ludus and the Academic Program Design office on a document with the know-how and a training for some teachers to work on this methodology.
Stakeholders served
- Students
- Teachers
- Partners
- Ludus Center (educational innovation of teachers)
- Curriculum design Unit
- Teachers from Legal Design Thinking
Key Milestones
- December 2023: Have a pilot document of the know-how of Legal Design Thinking. The idea it’s to validate the content and then design a visual manual, book or educational guide.
- March 2024: Start meeting with partners in order to present a plan for 2025´s Strategic plan (which is presented and approved by the authorities in July 2025)
- June 2024: Have a proposal formulated and validated by the school authorities
- September 2024: Plan teacher training and finish details of the document ¨Design thinking for all careers: how to apply it¨ (tentative name)
- December 2024: Start the teacher training plan. Disseminate a 1.0 version of the book/material among the selected teachers.
- March 2025: Let the classes begin to work on this methodology. That the Ithaka Center works as a reference and consultant for teachers. Start receiving comments, feedbacks and testimonies, experiences from the teachers to improve the first version of the material. This book will be in continuous improvement and would have an annual release with each improvement every march.
An Innovation Portfolio
- Mandatory course ¨Legal Design Thinking¨ for all first-year law students
- A Minor in entrepreneurship
- Open innovation laboratory as an elective course
- Mandatory course ¨entrepreneurship¨ for all the business sciences students faculty
- ¨Add innovation¨ a contest for pre-university students to win scholarships where they are challenged to design innovative solutions for their secondary schools. This is a way to reward creativity and entrepreneurial skills in teenangers.
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