CREATING THE CLASSROOM OF THE FUTURE THROUGH CO-CREATION

Self-building, discovery, exploration, experimentation, criticism and, in general, active and deep learning are becoming more and more important in Higher Education and require redesigning the traditional classroom. To reach this goal, the School of Civil Engineering of the Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain supported an educational innovation project were a co-creation workshop was carried out to propose a prototype of the “classroom of the future”.

The workshop involved students, researchers and professors from different fields such as ergonomics, architecture, construction engineering, health and safety, and innovation. Two were the main outcomes of the workshop: a Decalogue describing the main features of the classroom and two reduced scale prototypes of the classroom.

The workshop used active learning methodologies and was developed in two sessions. The first one included some short presentations by the professors, team building activities, creative techniques (6-3-5, Scenario design, POV, customer journey map) and a final feedback.
The second session was devoted to prototyping and resulted in two different models built. The main ideas of the workshop were summarized in a document that was used as a basis for the design of a new classroom that will start to work on the academic year 2018-2019.

This paper will describe the methodologies and the main outcomes of the co-creation workshop and will point out to questions and research issues in the field of new learning spaces for higher education.