User Centered Design of a Curriculum for Teaching Creativity Online

Creativity was identified as one of the four cornerstone skills of future engineers and is said to rely on direct connection to others, and on teaching settings allowing for face-to-face phronetic experience. Against the background of the pandemic-caused online teaching, the main objective of the European project TICON – Teaching creativity online - is to identify barriers in engineering Higher Education for teaching creativity online, and to upskill the teachers in terms of digital teaching with appropriate pedagogical approaches.
The underlying curriculum, was developed following a User-Centred Design approach. In the first step, Experience Interviews with 32 Higher Education engineering teachers in Turkey, Irleand, Denmark and Germany have been conducted. As a result, barriers and best-practises as well as further needs and interests have been identified.
On this basis, a first draft of the curriculum – the curriculum prototype - was designed and presented to the target group in Focus Groups in each of the four countries. Within each Focus Group, participants were introduced to the project and findings of the interviews. A group discussion was then held by going through the draft curriculum for three aims: To understand, if the curriculum prototype fits into the problem space derived by the Experience Interviews; to derive further needs and ideas for the curriculum and to validate the prototype. The final curriculum consists of three lessons: 1) Why - Introduction to creativity teaching and its relevance for engineering; 2) What - Method and tool skills for online teaching and 3) How - Skill development for how to teach.