Innovation – Digital Learning Dispatches

Associations, Digital Learning, Events, Leadership, Learning Futures, Policy and Strategy, Teaching

Learning for Tomorrow, Today: Future Fit Universities for 2040

An innovative future-focussed Higher Education Symposium bringing together students from more than 10 universities across Europe will take place in Brussels in early November. The main objective of this free symposium (only a few places remaining) is to explore different scenarios for Higher Education by 2040 and help shape futures thinking with a strong learner perspective on new models and approaches to teaching and learning. In addition to a strong student presence, the symposium has been designed for rich dialogue between educational leaders, policy-makers and industry stakeholders.

Why a Focus on 2040

A child born today will not graduate from a European university until around 2040. The question is what type of university education will they experience in another 20 years from now? How will universities have responded by 2040 to the major challenges and forces of change facing our societies, and the Higher Education sector in particular? The student voice is central to this unique future-focused symposium as we discuss ‘learning for tomorrow, today’. Students will feature throughout the event as we look to challenge conventional institutional thinking and to reimagine the teaching and learning experience for better futures – for all.

Location

Brussels, Dutch House of Provinces
Rue de Treves 59
Brussels

Programme Outline – Tuesday 6th November

10:30 – ECIU Student Summit (Students Only)

12:30 – Lunch

‍13:00 – Welcome from Moderator

13:05 – Welcome from Rob van Eijkeren (Head of Office Dutch House of Provinces)

13:10 – Introduction to ECIU and the Big Questions by Professor Mark Brown

‍13:20 – Student Insights – Teaching and Learning in the University of 2040

‍13:50 – World Cafes – Exploring the Big Questions (led by students)

15:00 – Refreshment Break

15:20 – World Cafes Report Back

‍15:45 – ECIU Response to the World Cafes

‍16:00 – Stakeholder Panel Discussion

– Adam Gajek (European Students’ Union),
– Thérèse Zhang (European University Association),
– Vanessa Debiais-Sainton (European Commission),
– European Parliament (TBC)

16:45 – Summary Comments

16:55 – Close of Event

‍17:00 – Networking with Refreshments

Event Host

The Symposium is being hosted by the European Consortium of Innovative Universities (ECIU) under the leadership of the Steering Committee for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, chaired by Director of the NIDL.

Further Information

You can register and find more information about this event on the ECIU’s website:

https://www.eciu.org/news/future-fit-universities-for-2040

If you have any further questions about this event, then please do not hesitate to contact Olga Wessels in ECIU’s Brussels office:

<olga.wessels@eciu.org>

Development, Digital Learning, Events, Learning Futures

Discovering our Talent and Creativity through a Purposefully Different Experience

Last Friday, staff in the National Institute for Digital Learning (NIDL) at Dublin City University (DCU) joined together for a whole of team collaborative professional development activity. Notably, this experience was purposefully different with a creative twist. In two teams, combining over 20 people across all three NIDL units, the challenge for the morning was to produce a large piece of urban art (i.e., graffiti) based on two randomly assigned themes.

NIDL 2017a.jpg
As hopefully you can tell from the selected images the two themes were Pirates and Western. At first this was a rather daunting task for people in the face of two large blank canvasses (walls). However, after a brief 101 tutorial on the basics of drawing and painting graffiti from our two expert mentors, each team set about their task by brainstorming possible concepts, sketching out initial designs and learning how to hold and spray a paint can.

Some people took to this task naturally whereas others slowly warmed to the experience, especially given the doors were left open most of the time to avoid paint fumes.

It’s also fair to say that dividing up tasks, learning new artistic skills and working in a team to produce the intended design was not easy. Notably, the two groups responded quite differently to the challenge under the guidance of their respective team leaders.

There was a lot of good banter and healthy competition, nevertheless, between the two teams as the large walls gradually filled and increasingly became alive with colourful imagery.

Over the course of the morning a number of hidden talents emerged and by the end of the experience both teams were rather pleased with their efforts. We believe the final results depicted in the photos immediately above and below illustrate the creative flair, collective problem-solving abilities and collaborative across unit potential of the NIDL team–that is, irrespective of whether you seek treasure or just prefer to have a quiet drink in the saloon.

Of course, the challenge for us in the New Year is to build on this innovative professional development experience to more fully harness our combined talents. We hope through this non digital experience (apart from the photos) that we have set a new benchmark for discovering more creative, distinctive and transformative ways of realising our vision of designing, implementing and researching new Blended, Online and Digitally-enhanced (BOLD) models of education.

In the meantime, the words of Einstein spring to mind and go some way to encapsulating the real spirit and essence of last week’s purposefully different professional development challenge, as we strive in the NIDL to promote talent, creativity, and consistent excellence:

“Creativity is intelligence having fun”

(Albert Einstein)