CReativity E-MOdules in Education Erasmus Project

Project Title

CReativity E-MOdules in Education

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2015

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Creativity and culture; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education

Project Summary

Background and objective of the project:
In the modern European society and throughout the world individuals are expected to be creative. Creativity has become the engine that drives forward innovative and entrepreneurial activity in educational, private and public organisations and societal development as a whole. To meet these increasingly high expectations for creative performance, individuals need an effective creativity training and education. In most educational institutions across Europe students are not offered creativity training, and as a result, they may not learn about the possibility to advance creative competences and neither about the fundamentals of how to use creativity training for becoming more creative human beings.

Objectives:
This project aims at making creativity training accessible for all higher education institutions across Europe through the design of a new E-Module that can be integrated into existing curriculum in courses. The E-Module content can be customised from 15 minutes up till 50 hours of creativity training, the latter accounts for 2 ECTS workload for students. The E-Module is available at www.academyforcreativity.com. For the best user experience, we recommend using Firefox or Google Chrome Internet browsers.

The E-Module we have developed consist of both an embodied and reflective training. The embodied creativity training uses simulated, short and induced gamified exercises in which trainees practice-by-doing. The reflective creativity training uses questions and essay style gamified tasks in which trainees develop understanding-by-metathinking. The essential notion of making this kind of training in a digital and online version is to overcome the need in local higher educational institutions for a dedicated expert in creativity to facilitate this kind of training.

The primary objective is to provide an understanding and consensus about the fact that creativity may be trained, and that it can be trained as an integrated part of education programmes in higher education institutions and their students. Also, it was the objective to provide to the educational institutions and the students directly, a customizable E-Module that they can easily implement into existing curricular without prior knowledge about creativity or being used by students as an extracurricular study activity (summer school, elite program, personal development, etc.).

Please see appendix 28 for a detailed description of the 5 partners and individual profiles.

Results and impact:
We have projected, invented, designed and programmed 10 individual creativity training “games” that each makes deliberate practice of minimum 2 of creativity training variables. Each of the games makes a deliberate practice of more than the specific training variables labelled in the system, however, through the project we have identified the depicted ones as the most important and most understandable variables for the users. Each game has between 30 and 90 rounds that cover three levels of difficulty (easy, medium, hard). Please see appendix 14 and 15 for a detailed description of each game. We have also projected, invented, designed and programmed an assessment tool, a teacher profile, a student profile and an extra “game” for reflective creativity training (please see appendix 12, 13, and 16 for more details).

– In total we have had 34.467 users/unique visitors since project start, whereas 92,7% or 31.951 of them are from EU countries. The top 5 countries are: 1. Denmark (57,7%), 2. Spain (16,0%), 3. Belgium (5,9%), 4. Poland (4,8%), 5. Malta (4,2% – please see appendix 24 for more details).
– We reached a total of 2.096 pilot testers who participated in the developed of the E-Module.
– From a sample of 300 students in Spain, we found that the students using the E-Module for about 10 hours advanced students skills on key measures like fluency (29%), originality (44%), elaboration (26%), flexibility (21%), and visualization (38%).

Longer-term benefits:
We expect that society will benefit from this project on two dimensions: citizens will generally become more open-minded and flexible towards new initiatives and other changes in the society, and more creative citizens will result in more pro-active behaviour. The economy will be boosted by stimulating new venture creation that is based on valuable novel ideas. The creative self-efficacy skill the training enhances, intrinsically motivates the trainees to find new ways to improve his or her life and the life of others by initiating innovative and entrepreneurial processes.

The E-Module is finished in its current version (2.0). As such, no further development is needed right now. However, to ensure a dynamic development of the E-Module and to innovate even further on the content and platform, all partners have agreed to continue the sustainability of the E-Module after the project ends.

Please see appendix 29 for a more comprehensive version of this project summary.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 392109,07 Eur

Project Coordinator

AALBORG UNIVERSITET & Country: DK

Project Partners

• UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID
• UNIVERSITA TA MALTA
• GRADUATE UNIVERSITY OF CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
• Vast: Next Generation Learning