The project aims at making creativity training accessible for all educational institutions across Europe through a new E-Module that can be integrated into existing curriculum in courses. In the European modern 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 in societal development as a whole. To meet these increasingly high expectations for creative performance, individuals need an effective mean. In most educational institutions across Europe students are not offered creativity training and as a result they most likely do not know the fundamentals of how to enhance their creative competences for becoming more creative. Research has proven that creativity training can improve creative competences – in the same way that practicing piano makes you a better piano player. Embodied Creativity Training is probably the most effective mean for becoming more creative. Embodied creativity is trained using simulated, short and induced exercises in which you learn-by-doing using your body and mind. Aalborg University has for years been developing one of the most advanced embodied creativity training programmes in the world. The programme builds individual and collaborative competences. This project will turn this programme into an Creativity E-Module. Hereby overcoming the need for a human facilitator and thus makes it possible for any teachers across Europe to offer creativity training in their education. The project will develop a tool that is accessible for every student at European higher educational institutions to become consistently more creative in their everyday life. Together with American and Chinese partners, Aalborg University have already created a prototype to get proof-of-concept of the digitalization of embodied creativity training. This has been tested by student trainees across Europe since October 2014. Due to the positive results achieved it is clear that a more professional approach with more and new resources, knowledge and brains will transform this concept into reality. The consortium established wish to start over and make an E-module that can mass-disseminate creativity training by making it easy to use and accessible to all European educational institutions. This the project will not “just” digitalize standard classroom creativity training exercises and expect a successful digital training program, the partnership will instead redesign exercises and develop new ones. This project will benefit all students in the European educational system in all disciplines and fields of knowledge where teachers find it applicable. It will benefit primarily students who desire to start and carry out innovative and entrepreneurial activities; they will train their creative competencies. As a result, the future European workforce will become more proactive and more creative. This project will change how students, educators, educational institutions and businesses behave and influence society. We expect the following effects: • Students and graduates will become more creative; they will gain stronger abilities in creativity and new thinking through the usage of the Creativity E-Module. • These students will gain confidence and competences to pursue personal, academic and professional goals involving high levels of originality and usability. • More creative students will lead to a more creative workforce. • Students will improve their employability. • Educational institutions will have the chance to actively make their students more creative even though they do not have the competences in-house and thereby enhance the students' employability skills. • A more creative workforce will lead to organisational development on the general and the team level. • Teams will experience more original and useful work, and cross-disciplinary teams will have better conditions for combining their knowledge in new ways. • This will in the long run lead to increased competitive advantage for European organizations because they will be more likely to become market leaders in innovation. • It is expected 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 society; and more creative citizens will result in more pro-active behavior • The economy will be boosted by stimulating new venture creation. The creative self-efficacy skill the training enhances, intrinsically motivates the trainees to find new ways to improve his or hers life and the life of others by initiating and successfully complete an innovative and entrepreneurial process.
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.