The changing classroom

From the Winter 2013 issue of Dalhousie magazine.

On a Tuesday night in November, in the Learning Incubator & Networking Centre (LINC) at the Killam Library, undergraduates gather on couches around screens for 15 minutes before their professor, Dr. Mary Kilfoil, arrives. Nine teams of three or four students from business, computer science, engineering and science faculties log onto Google Docs. They present on everything from licensing a spring-loaded device for knee braces to generating capital for an IT system for the deep-pocketed reinsurance industry. They’ve prepped on their own time, watching a video on Udacity – a privately owned massive open online course, or MOOC. They’ve consulted potential clients, exposed ideas to the talons of real consumers, seeking elusive profitability. They learn more about entrepreneurship this way than they ever could from a lecture.

This is one of a number of new learning models being tested by Dalhousie faculty, in pockets of innovation stitched through the campus – and watched with interest by many, including Dr. Fiona Black, director of academic planning and leader of Dalhousie’s Academic Innovation Initiative, which aims to create a vision for how curriculum is developed and delivered in 2020 and beyond. “How can we profile those innovations, share them and foster an ongoing culture of innovation?” asks Dr. Black.

The innovation initiative has high profile. President Tom Traves and Vice-President  (Academic and Provost) Carolyn Watters grace the homepage (dal.ca/dept/academic-innovation.html), where students, faculty, staff and alumni contribute to an ideas bank and blog. Institution-wide events, departmental meetings and in-person consultations are being held all year. Funding is being directed to specific initiatives. “We want to allow faculty to take risks and not fear failure; tenure isn’t affected if an idea doesn’t work out,” says Dr. Black.

By year’s end, there will be a detailed plan for two to three large-scale ideas that may be implemented across most undergraduate programs. Students are crucial contibutors and have shared their thoughts, particularly in regard to undergraduate education. And innovations aren’t on hold while the initiative does its work: faculties and professors are already moving ahead, with promising results.

Making it real

As one entrepreneurial team presents its findings to cohorts in the LINC, Dr. Kilfoil reminds them that not every detail of the plan will be sorted by term’s end. This is the beginning of a longer-term process. “It’s about understanding the components of the business model,” she says. It’s trial by error; failing early is encouraged so that success will come sooner.

Another group, focused on student services, is already on its plan B. Its first effort, a couponing service, didn’t find profit potential. But this second idea, a Facebook application matching job seekers with odd jobs, looks more promising. One mentor suggests charging a percentage of the job value rather than membership fees. “So you aren’t asking people to pay for unproven benefits,” he says.

The class is called Starting Lean, and it’s unique in Canada. Based on the work of Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, it acts on the insight that startups aren’t simply smaller versions of corporations, which already know who their customers are and how to price their products. Startups must figure out who to partner with, what the products will look like, who will buy them, how to get them to market and what to charge. Without that knowledge, they are faith-based enterprises needing testing – serious off-campus legwork.

The search process is guided by experts. “Each team has a mentor who is a well-connected successful entrepreneur from the community,” explains Dr. Ed Leach, who assists Dr. Kilfoil. “It emphasizes experiential learning, a flipped classroom and immediate feedback to engage students with real-world entrepreneurship.”

Some of the startups have already earned attention. Execute Skate and AnalyzeRe received rave reviews from mentors and organizers of Launch36 and were accepted into their five-month accelerator program, a regional initiative to connect promising tech firms to funding and other supports. Execute has developed a skateboard motion sensor (“trick recognition technology”) for passing advice to other boarders at specific locations. The group presents on barriers it has just identified, like new U.S. regulations protecting kids from location tracking. AnalyzeRe provides innovative IT services using advanced statistics to bring predictability to the 250 global companies insuring insurance companies, in case of catastrophe. The group has its first client, unpaid, giving its members a chance to work out the kinks and prove themselves.

Between the sessions and video lectures, students are talking to a hundred potential customers. According to Blank, testing a theoretical business plan with real customers is critical: it’s unlikely the plan will survive unchanged, but each failure makes the plan stronger as students integrate feedback and ideas. As a result, when the business is launched, its chances of success are much higher than traditional startups, which have a 90 per cent failure rate.

The mentors and students are working to find ventures that can grow big, often requiring significant investment capital with a high risk of loss. “We think this course contributes to the building of a regional innovation ecosystem,” Dr. Leach says of the motivation for launching Starting Lean. “We need to harness the entrepreneurial talent we have right here in order to stimulate economic growth and build long-run economic capacity.”

Connect it to the world

Picture it: after her workout a student cuts across Wickwire Field toward her afternoon lab, sipping coffee, checking messages on her iPhone. Freeze frame. Zoom in on the coffee. Etch dotted lines from the cup; zoom out again. The lines extend from a shrinking map of Nova Scotia, down around Florida, toward Central America. The coffee beans were grown by Guatemalan villagers. Zoom in and see their weathered hands work the earth.

Back to the student on Wickwire. What about the iPhone? What is its connection to child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo? What about the land she walks across, unceded Mi’kmaq territory?

This fall a new course, Halifax in the World, will connect students to the globe, past and present. The choice of the phone, coffee and land were arbitrary, yet significant. “What we wear and eat are also connected to European history and colonialism right here,” Dr. John Cameron says.

The idea for the course was sparked three years ago in conversation among Dr. Cameron in International Development Studies (IDS) and Canadian Studies professors Dr. Claire Campbell and Dr. Erin Wunker. All faced the challenge of trying to develop and staff courses while working in smaller departments. Perhaps a course that combined the social sciences and humanities, linking quantitative data with qualitative analysis and fiction, could allow them to meet their goals of helping students connect compassionately and empathetically with others around the globe. “We had instant agreement,” Dr. Cameron recalls.

Students take an active role. They first familiarize themselves with Hugh MacLennan’s classic WWI-era Halifax novel, Barometer Rising. They walk the route Mr. MacLennan’s protagonist walked, making careful observations, as he did after returning from the war, and finish as he did with a soup and sandwich in a café. They get intimate with the city – the armoury, navy and transport ships, shops and people. Seeing and experiencing these sites creates opportunities for asking questions about foreign policy, industry, globalization and environment.

Specific attention is paid to contested grounds, including a visit to Africville Park, where an African-Nova Scotian community was evicted in the late 1960s after 130 years of living there. “We have African-Nova Scotian activists and spoken word artists coming in to talk and perform,” Dr. Cameron says.

The course will challenge students to create a project of positive change in Halifax, “as an antidote to overwhelming information.” That step from awareness to action is what makes this course both a Canadian Studies course and one in International Development Studies. It has to do with developing global citizens – people who understand the ethical challenges of being connected to the rest of the world and act on that understanding. “Too much of the focus in IDS is on what happens over there. I haven’t come across any other IDS course that explicitly connects our daily lives in Canada to development issues in other parts of the world,” says Dr. Cameron.

Break down the silos

Dr. Black, whose job it is to identify and build on innovative courses like Starting Lean and Halifax in the World, says the best innovations often come from breaking down traditional silos. At Dal, that means involving the university’s four campuses, all its faculties and faculty members, staff and students.

“The honed expertise of each faculty is important, but work that cuts across the boundaries of these mini-institutions is what allows a visionary perspective,” says Dr. Black. In turn, that vision equips graduates with the ability to serve society’s emerging needs.

Dr. Cameron’s course is one example of silo busting, straddling faculties and ways of knowing. On a larger scale, the College of Sustainability, which feted its first graduates in spring 2012, has chosen a similar approach.

The program draws from five separate faculties and is governed by a council of the five deans, thus mixing five different worldviews to create a richer, more powerful approach to sustainability. The program was designed with student input as well.

That responsiveness is a good sign for the vitality of any university, and is essential as Dalhousie responds to the demographic and technological shifts happening in society and on campus. “The Academic Innovation Initiative will help Dal build on its natural advantages while putting students, faculty and staff into the educational driver’s seat, so that we remain not only relevant but innovative and exciting into 2020 and beyond,” says Dr. Black.