Abstract:

The study is based on a multinational education development Project: CreaCIT – Creative Cross Innovation Tutor, which aims to design, build and test a creative and cross disciplinary e-learning environment for product development. The emphasis is on students learning creativity. The main target groups are students on secondary and tertiary education levels around Europe. The earning environment is blended; learning takes place both in an e-learning environment and in a class room environment. The learning of creativity should not be limited to vocational arts and crafts students but rather something for everyone. We use a narrative and constructive approach in tasks and encourage students to learn methods in an appealing e-learning environment that stimulates imagination and fosters creativity, commercial innovation and user-centred design in new concepts and products. Some of the tasks can be done alone and some in groups. As the tasks get more demanding, transversal activities increase and multidisciplinary skills are required. Students of the secondary and tertiary levels can interact in teamwork, something which creates understanding of other fields and brings learning closer to real life situations – product development teams are hardly ever homogenous. This paper focuses on describing the experiences gained in the task building project. We create multilevel reusable tasks for learning creative problem solving and building user-oriented products. By products we mean both tangible and intangible products. The tasks are based on the product development cycle. Students learn to explore and gain understanding of users, specifications and literatura; analyse data and create insights and opportunities to develop, generate solutions and test, evaluate and refine the work. Students receive peer and teacher feedback to improve their work. Furthermore, we aim to involve students who do not typically study product development for instance, nurse students but who still can gain for it. We test usability and learning outcomes in several second and third level institutes and discuss the challenges in task building. An innovative e-learning environment that supports blended learning is created in the project. This paper is relevant for all who plan blended learning courses or are interested in teaching creativity or product development.

Keywords:

Blended learning, Task building, Learning environment, Creativity, Product development.