These topics will be covered in the meeting, resources or your tasks.

List of Innovation Lab meetings for you to attend

After completing the above objectives, the Syllabus & Schedule was used with a cohort of challenge students during the summer of 2021. This time, results from the anonymous feedback survey were mostly positive (but not overwhelmingly so).

Taken together with (undocumented) discussions with several students, it seems quite likely that some of this critical feedback relates less to the syllabus and more to a misalignment between the scope of the challenges carried out by mentors and the initial Innovation Lab framing of these challenges. Specifically, some of the challenges seemed to be led by mentors to solve technical problems rather than as exploratory, student-led challenges. Addressing these issues relate more to partnership development, framing of the challenge, and the invitation – some of which are addressed further below.

Student feedback about the syllabus:

After reviewing more student feedback and in preparation for the fall 2021 iteration, I designed the following improvements to the syllabus:

Consequently, a summary and mentorship guide was prepared for sharing with prospective challenge partners who might mentor students and collaborate with the lab. Along with the mentorship guide, it may be helpful to add a visual overview of the syllabus (see the Syllabus & Schedule in the appendix). Although some exploratory research was carried out, the materials I discovered predominantly were about career mentorship and were not that helpful. Therefore, the guide was written from personal learning experiences (including conversations and feedback from students in past challenges and my own experience leading teams).

The mentorship guide outline:

The mentorship guide is available for download:

During the course of the winter and summer 2021 challenges, several students reported that workloads across their teams felt very unevenly distributed.

I identified this as an opportunity to create an additional tool, a team-forming discussion guide, assembled with the support of brainstorming and initial contributions from Concordia Innovation Lab alumni. As the alumni also supported student teams, I facilitated an ideation session with them to elicit multiple perspectives on the issues, solutions, and activity formats. The students strongly preferred a tip-sheet format, and six issues emerged, so each leader was tasked with writing some tips for two issues.

However, I was concerned that a tip sheet would not be an ideal learning tool for these interpersonal issues and did not reflect the hands-on and experimental praxis of the Innovation Lab. Therefore, I produced a discussion guide by reassembling the tips and adding 3 issues which emerged during my research. The guide scaffolds a group discussion through 9 topics relating to team collaboration, thus granting each team the trust to learn and figure it out together. Additionally, the guide creates accountability among the team (and to the lab) by requesting that students document their agreements, sign them, and share them with the Innovation Lab. The hope is that the agreements students document may further improve how the lab supports students in forming healthy team dynamics.

The team-forming discussion guide is available for download:

Student feedback about the teamwork experience:

The Systemic Design Approach report by the British Design Council includes many helpful prompting questions and descriptions and diagrams of the approach. However, for students who are unfamiliar with design research, it is not always clear how to begin. To this end, I designed, researched and developed guides on various design research methods.

At the beginning of the challenges, students are simultaneously forming a new team, adjusting to challenge-based learning, learning about design research, and trying to understand what is happening in their challenge topic. Therefore, I focused the guides on the most critical methods for understanding and exploring their challenging topic.

The exploration methods guide is available for download:

After interacting with students and mentors during the first iteration, I began advocating for an approach in which we let students bring their own challenge topic, develop a network of collaborators with whom to learn and ultimately address the challenge.

As part of a course assignment, I developed a research prospectus for a design-based research study that “focuses on important research gaps within the increasingly popular and highly relevant approaches to authentic learning in higher education.”

Subsequently, I carried out a critical literature review to “examine what the literature says about supporting higher education students learning to address complex problems by developing their own knowledge networks.”

Finally, in one of the student application forms, I included some optional questions to gauge student interest in working on their own challenge topics (85% interested) and working on a challenge over two terms (75% interested). These results align with what I heard anecdotally from students and what I found in the literature.

The research prospectus is available for download:

The critical literature review is available for download: