Our innovation courses in IEED at Lancaster University Management School are for undergraduates, postgraduates and for business are highly interactive.
How we do it ?
Undergraduates and postgraduates
Each course has a combination of online materials, group work, personal learning logs and weekly face to face workshops, rather than conventional lectures. No paper is handed out, all material is available through the course virtual learning environment.
A key feature of these and of the workshops, is iSearch a weekly innovation discuss which draws on the students reading of the business press. In dialogue with Mike and I, students assess articles on innovation appearing during the 10 weeks of the course.
They set them against the core theories addressed in the course and working in groups, using a wiki develop a consultancy report on one of the innovations. Across the two courses upward of 150 innovations are critically reviewed each year. This gives students key insights into
1. Innovation trends
2. The importance of looking outside a sectors’s immediate environment
3. The potential implications of new technologies, systems and processes
Students guide their peers on how the courses operate. Click below for some insight:
What the students say about our courses
We did not set out to innovate in our course design, but rather set about exploring what we wanted the students to achieve from a course in innovation. Innovation occured nevertheless because we solved problems in how to teach such interesting and ever shifting, live course material.
Mike observed:
“I cannot claim to have a teaching philosophy because this is my first real teaching experience. However Mary agreed to my proposal that I treat the students as I would employees during an extensive period of management change. We aimed to change normal student behaviour and develop full student participation throughout the course.”
We believe that no single element of the course design was responsible for achieving these objectives. Rather it was the combination of the self-reinforcing nature of the different elements of the course. We received Lancaster University Pilkington Award for Innovative Teaching in June 2005, from Chancellor Sir Chris Bonington. External recognition is of course enormously rewarding. However, we did not design the course to win a prize but to stimulate students. Their reflections, some e-mailed to us personally, some included in anonymous feedback and some from the 17 students who nominated us along with our colleagues, convinced us that we had removed some of the barriers to creative thinking.
We have applied similar principles to designing courses for business. The most recent of these were two one day workshops on collaborative software and social media for SMEs on IEED’s Innovation for Growth course.
