How can impact-driven education help students make a positive societal impact? The first edition of our Educational Impact Series webinars revolved around the topic of design education. Kees Dorst, professor in Design Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney and leading authority in the field of design kicked off with an inspiring keynote.
Complex. Confusion. Exciting
After Kees' presentation, we asked participants to share their thoughts; what come to mind when thinking of design education? The word cloud that this induced proved a useful starting point for further research and conversations. Entries varied from society to business, and from inspiration to complexity. This gave us an insightful impression: there are opportunities and questions, but we feel a broad willingness to further explore the topic.
In a first break-out session, participants got to learn a little more about forms of design-based education that EUR already employs. During the second break-out sessions, we asked participants to formulate a set of learning questions alongside our professionals. We take the outcome of this exercise as the starting point of our community of practice. You can find the list of learning questions at the bottom of this page!
Learning questions
Interaction with stakeholders
- How to integrate and get good relevant real-life problems from our partners in our education?
- How to create a sustainable way to work with external partners? And find partnerships?
- What can we expect from these stakeholders? And what can they expect from us?
Skill and competences
- How to include transdisciplinary design practices in the regular educational programmes?
- How to guide students when dealing with uncertainty and failure in the process?
- What are the skills / competencies we are trying to teach the students? And how can design-based education help you with that?
Design-based education and research
- How to implement impact driven education and research in the wider system?
- How to assess different academic outputs?
- How to deal with getting stuck?
- How can society / societal actors be involved in assessing academic outputs?
Measuring educational impact
- For whom do we measure the impact of education?
- How can we measure behavioral change in students to measure impact?
- Short-term, midterm, long-term model of evaluation for different stakeholders?