Little Papers, Big Ideas

By Darren Clift, Writer

Journey mapping with the Transforming the Instructional Landscape team

Playing with sticky notes isn’t just for kindergarten classrooms. For universities and colleges who practise design thinking, these little pieces of paper serve as creative tools, and a wall covered in rainbow-coloured sticky notes can lead to big ideas. The Innovation Hub’s Transforming the Instructional Landscape (TIL) team experienced this earlier this semester, when we collaborated with our project partners at Academic + Campus Events (ACE) in a Journey Mapping session.  

Project Primer: Data Analysis

Danielle Baillargeon, Data Analysis Team Lead

What happens to all the interviews and data that the Innovation Hub collects?  Over the past three years, over 450 students and staff have shared their experiences with our teams. We are honoured that so many were willing to entrust us with their stories and experiences, which helped us identify their needs, suggest and prototype services and supports, and contribute to substantive changes at U of T through over a dozen collaborative projects. The interviews and feedback we receive are the basis from which we advocate for change in all our collaborations, including the New College Dining Hall redesign, the Family Care Office projects, and the classroom redesign under the Transforming the Instructional Landscape Project. 

Day of Learning – June 16, 2016

On June 16th we continued our learning with a focus on learning how innovative methodologies from a wide variety of industries might be applied to the student experience at U of T.  Speakers included many of our own faculty/staff from some of the most innovative areas of U of T and colleagues from the community who are doing some great work in this space.  You can check out our Google Drive folder for more details about the Day of Learning and a collection of some of the presentations.  We wrapped up the day with a very human-centred debrief time on the Cumberland House Lawn.