Oy, it’s the end of the semester and time is flying! Two weeks ago I attended my first OLC conference – OLC Innovate in New Orleans. It was a fantastic experience.  We had quite a few MSU faculty, staff & graduate students in attendance and it was a rare opportunity to hang out with colleagues after hours! (As a telecommuter, I don’t often get the chance to stay late and socialize!)  My session was titled: Facilitating & Fostering Passion and Inventiveness: Embodied Experiences From a University Unit Start Up. It was a great opportunity for me to take a look back at the past 7-or-so months that The Hub has been in existence and to reflect and share our successes and failures iterations.

Here are the slides & abstract from the presentation:

Michigan State University has started a new campus initiative: The Hub for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (“The Hub”). The Hub’s mission is to “facilitate the passion and inventiveness of students, faculty, staff, and stakeholders both inside and outside of MSU to create, identify, and accelerate new ways to collaborate, learn, research, and deliver instruction.” While the core staff of The Hub is quite small, many on campus will be working with and through the Hub, a new mode of work in a large land grant institution. To facilitate this change, the Hub leadership team has anchored much of its “getting started” work and processes to design thinking.

In this session you will experience some of the design challenges used with the MSU Hub team and learn about our work and progress so far. Participants will also be asked to share their experiences with design thinking. Expect to walk away from the session with tangible resources to further your own design thinking work in teams or in the classroom.