Studio for Teaching and Learning Innovation

The challenge

While the Studio for Teaching and Learning Innovation has worked with Tribe Innovation multiple times, most recently they tackled the issue of how to move forward from the pandemic and learn from how the pandemic affected education. How Might we take advantage of the ways we adapted during COVID-19 to enhance teaching and learning in the post-pandemic William & Mary world.

STLI was able to recognize there are many innovations from COVID-19 that educators should exploit in a post pandemic world, Tribe Innovation created a Sprint that would best help them brainstorm these potential innovations. While the pandemic created many challenges, there are some aspects that may be worth saving or iterating on. This Sprint utilized members of STLI, other faculty as well as students to find a diverse range of experiences to generate ideas. During both workshops, facilitators took STLI participants through the create phase of design thinking which included brainstorming, organizing, converging, and prototyping.

The RESULTS

Through 7 breakout groups, of both faculty and students, a total of 140 ideas were generated. These ideas were converged into one idea per group. Overall each group touched on ideas that would create more accessibility and diversity in education, from creating different modalities for class to being more understanding and flexible with students' needs, as well as tapping into the newfound benefits of technology to create more remote opportunities. All these ideas were inspired by individuals' experiences over the past year and a half and honed into more refined ideas with the help of their groups. As a result of these workshops, STLI members learned about the design thinking process and developed innovative solutions.