Resource:How to design curriculum for your new innovation center
Contents
Overview
Designing curriculum is not an overnight venture and hinges on the support of faculty, staff, students, and the administration to become a success. Curriculum can take shape in many forms including pop-up classes, classes for credit, and workshops in an Innovation Center. Learning how to effectively utilize all these resources at a university is a challenging task but it is possible with a strong group of student leaders.
Vocabulary
Credit Classes
Sessions that allow students to learn a topic for credit towards their degree that often form after a professor has tried the lesson in an experimental fashion. These classes are paid for and supported by the learning institution regardless of their location. This is the standard class that students and faculty are familiar with for teaching.
Curriculum Design
Old ideology that focused solely on building a robust set of learning objectives and "How-Tos" regardless of how each student would be effected. This has now shifted into Learning Experience Design.
Learning Experience Design
New ideology that spawned from Curriculum Design to incorporate how students truely learn and how their environment affects the learning conducted in classes. This shift has brought forth questions around "How could bad or boring classes be improved?" and "What makes good or interesting classes so great?". These questions are being tested through experimental teachings in pop-up classes and workshops in Innovation Centers.
Pop-Up Classes
Short workshops that are often the beginning, experimental stages of credit classes. These are used by professors to test out new topics and methods for teaching with an engaged student audience. Collaboration is often a key part of these courses followed by a focus on breaking the conventional static classroom setup. More information on Pop-Up Classes can be found here: How to Build Pop-Up Classes
Faculty Support
A key to starting any movement on a university is faculty support. Timothy Moore advised, “You need to find at least one advisor who will be your rock. Basically, they will be the bridge between you and the university. Anything you want to accomplish or support for will go through them.” There is no limit for how many advisors you can have, in fact, the more faculty that you can get on board with your idea the more resources you will have.
To find faculty support, you must do your homework first. (This step taken literally won’t hurt your chances either because you will need teachers to like you.) You will need to find a professor who is very passionate about a topic that is close to yours. Just google your professor’s name and see what comes up! Any biographies, ads, even social media can help you to find a passionate professor.
The next step is forming a relationship. The more quickly you can do this then the closer you will be to your end goal. Start by building up information about the professor and their interests. If you are taking a class instructed by them this will be easy because they most likely will have told you about themselves and you will already have a reason for speaking with them. If you are not taking a class from the professor, then it’s up to you to create an open line of communication. When initially starting any form of relationship with someone, start with asking about them and their goals. Showing interest in their work will make them interested in yours. When you finally feel comfortable asking for their help do so, and this will build a foundation with your advisor. Do not become discouraged if they decline your offer, it simply means that there is an even greater advisor to find.
If you are fortunate enough to be working with several advisors, then be sure to arrange a system that allows you to maximize your support from each. Set up a strong communication network that everyone can easily access and be sure to help foster relations between your advisors. Periodic meetings will help your advisors to know what they can do to help.
Pop-Up Classes
An example of a Pop-up class idea for entrepreneurial-minded students could be “Pitching your idea to an Investors” The attendees would form small groups and come up with a business idea. By the end of the workshop, each group would have to pitch their new, innovative idea to each instructor, like a future investor.
Students, faculty, and the community would be reinforced to remember that no idea is dumb during the workshop. Imagine how many people called the person who created the float, pool Noodle dumb when he or she pitched the idea to someone, that person is now very rich. The purpose is to be brave when creating ideas, have fun, and learn crucial, hands on skills that will help accelerate their success. One does not learn without taking chances and what a better place to try new experiences than in a Pop-Up class.
University Innovation Fellow, Timothy Moore, discussed with a group of UIF candidates how his team and he created a curriculum for their innovation center. Moore’s team was so successful with their marketing strategies to get attendees, James Madison University developed locations around campus to “ educate, collaborate, and Innovate” for students, faculty, and the surrounding community. The JMU X Labs started with very few courses and now have classes that stretch from Drones to Hacking for Defense and all the way to Augmented & Virtual Reality Design.
Their team marketed the Pop-Up classes one month in advance with:
Flyers and Posters around campus
Social Medias- Facebook page, instagram, twitter
School T.V screens around campus
Stepping into various classes (with the teachers permission of course) and pitching one to two minute informational to the students about what the course will be about.
The awesome part of Pop-Up courses is that it connects students around campus that might have not had the opportunity to meet each other due to a difference in majors. Students studying chemistry that may have business aspirations also could take a Pop- Up class that is located in the Business department of school or vice versa. These types of expansions throughout campus are going to benefit and encourage students from all walks of life and majors to learn to work together and generate ideas that will change the world.
Additionally, Pop-Up courses are something that can be expanded to the entire community rather than just the students. Taking JMU X-Labs as an example, where they allowed people of the surrounding community to both attend and teach Pop-Up classes, free of charge, as a way to involve a larger group of people.
Expansion
The process of developing a curriculum for a future Innovation Center located on the campus of a University is a long, slow process. It takes a dedicated team with a vision to provide resources not already on a campus for a new, innovative style of learning. A place for the entrepreneurs and motivated students that want to make a difference, plan and brainstorm for the ideas of the future, to come and gather as one.The steps a team has taken are to network with the right professor or faculty, start raising funds. After a team has their envisioned curriculum backed by the right professor, with funds rolling in for expenses, expansion of their center will start. Expansion of an Innovation Center can be many things. It can be broadening the amount of topics they are allowed to cover, getting more mentors and advisors; more money starts to roll in
Timeline
- Gain Faculty Support (~1 Term/Semester)
- Find your voice to the college. This person will help you from Point A to Point B.
- Gain University Support (~1 Term/Semester)
- Get the college onboard. This way later you can do your work in the name of the university.
- Gain Funding (1 year)
- This sets the groundwork for everything to come and is the longest step.
- Fundraisers, donors, Support of Companies, Funds from the University, State Grants
- Don't forget to use your faculty support and be a representative of the college
- Build Excitement for Program (Few Months)
- Host some Out-of-the-Ordinary Events!
- Don't forget food!
- Posters go a long way, also hand out pamphlets
- Tabling! Boring but effective
- Don't forget to use the UIF family that you are now a part of! Everyone has great ideas!
- Pop-Up Classes (1 Term)
- Open to everyone
- Free for everyone (Funds come from Step 3)
- Professors volunteer for pop-up classes
- Play around with times and operations of the class
- Acceptance and Transformation (1 Term)
- After good attendance and professor comfortability pop-up classes transform into classes for credit
- Professors will be backed financially by the university to teach these
- Expansion
- Go beyond classroom work
- Hackathons and competitions
- Workshop series
- Find professors interested in subjects they don't currently teach
Misc Information for Success
When discussing the introduction of new curriculum into a school setting, it is important to gain support from faculty and attract students to the classes for which the curriculum is being designed.
Regarding faculty, it is important to understand their backgrounds and what might incite them to teach a specific curriculum. This is covered largely in the Faculty Support section. When it comes to actually contacting the faculty and securing their participation, some of the following tactics might be employed.
- Getting in touch with faculty:
- Find a “friend” on staff/faculty/administration
- Send out mass emails to faculty
- Display ads for your curriculum on televisions and display boards around campus
- Convince faculty the curriculum is worth their time:
- With needs and data as to why new curriculum is necessary
- Use ideas from other schools as a bargaining tool for comparison
- If ____ has it, why don’t we have ____
- MIT has the most Nobel Prize winning alumni, if they have ___ curriculum, why don’t we?
Students are oftentimes more difficult to entice, as they already have packed schedules and minimal time to spare. The best ways to attract students is often by creating weird and unusual events (3D Printing, hackathon, etc). Students will attend something that inspires them or gets them thinking critically. Oftentimes, this can be done through the simple forms of advertisement listed:
- Advertising to students
- 1-2 minute pitch at the beginning of classes by each team members
- Mass emails and personal emails
- Posters
- Event calendars
- Scrolling television ads
- Facebook, Twitter, and other social media
- First Year Experience or Innovation Classes
- Extra Credit Opportunities
