Foster knowledge co-creation

Knowledge co-creation is the development of student-led, collaborative initiatives leading to collaboratively created outputs such as written resources, videos, audio files, whole courses, or even courses curricula. Co-creation can be applied to many areas of HE, and often pushes students to work in partnership with researchers and other experts to improve their learning experience.

Working on knowledge co-creation fosters active and experiential learning, and facilitates student engagement, helping students to develop new skills, confidence, and learn how to apply knowledge.

Co-creation activities can have a high impact on a university, especially when students are required to work collaboratively with other actors, since this can open up opportunities to work in partnership with external agencies and promote the university’s reputation. At the same time, teachers can gain much inspiration from the knowledge produced by students.

In terms of strategy on how to engage students in collaborative knowledge production, we suggest that you engage students through all the phases of the activity. Building on the work by Chemi and Krogh, the five steps to approach the design of a co-creation activity are:

1. Framing/contextualising; defining the intention and understanding the field.
2. Finding the question(s); what are the challenges of the field we are entering?
3. Co-designing micro-prototypes (of knowledge production); in which ways will we try to engage with the challenges?
4. Co-operative performance.
5. Evaluating.

Many tools exist that easily allow collaboration between students in the classroom, enabling co-creation of resources, such as Padlet, Lino.it or EtherPad. These tools

• allow students to go deeper in the course content,
• encourage a more in-depth understanding of contents,
• facilitate brainstorming ideas from the class,
• help involving non-attending students,
• foster interactions among attending and non-attending students and
• create a memory of the course.