Ideas for Impact Experiential Project Course Descriptor

Course Overview

This course introduces students to key concepts and techniques for defining and addressing a complex real-world challenge and provides a framework for them to hone, apply, and refine this learning through teamwork and interactions with community, industry, or policy practitioners.

Working in teams and benefitting from practitioner briefings across a range of sectors, students will collectively comprehend and analyse a real-world problem, engage in research, and propose a creative, evidence-informed solution.

Students are supported by faculty and external mentors, with regular reflective exercises and question prompts to guide them in their work across the course.

All teams’ proposals will be presented in an Ideas for Impact event with faculty and external partners towards the end of the course.

The course fosters key transferable skills such as creativity, problem-solving, teamwork, and communication, all of which are highly sought-after in start-up, corporate, and government organisations as well as being of high personal and social value. It is designed to help empower students to make a meaningful impact in the world.
Across the course students will be encouraged to experiment in a safe environment while also engaging in structured reflection (both individually and in teams) to develop and refine their skills.

Learning Outcomes

On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

Knowledge and Understanding

Subject Specific Skills

Transferable and Employability Skills

Teaching and Learning

This course has a dedicated Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) page with a syllabus and detailed guidance, including reflective exercises and question prompts, to orientate and engage students in their studies.

The teaching and learning activities for this course are:

• 40 scheduled hours (lectures, workshops, and scheduled assessment activities)
• 110 private study hours (with regular structured assignments)

Faculty hold regular Office Hours, which are opportunities for students to drop in or sign up to explore ideas, raise questions, or seek targeted guidance or feedback, individually or in small groups. 

Students are expected to attend and participate in all the teaching and learning activities for this course and to manage their directed learning and private study.

Indicative total learning hours: 150

Assessment

Both formative and summative assessment are used as part of this course, with purely formative opportunities typically embedded within interactive teaching sessions, team check-ins, office hours, and/or the VLE.

Summative Assessments

Indicative Presentation:

• Report for team members
• Q&A

Indicative Portfolio:

• Team presentation at Ideas for Impact event (in a style appropriate for the audience). Only the student’s individual contribution is assessed.
• Individual outline of the real-world problem and the proposed creative, evidence-informed, actionable solution.
• Individual reflective report highlighting the process by which the team’s Idea for Impact was developed and presented, the ways in which they, the student, contributed within the team, and their learnings through the experience.
• Appendix (Evidence Log) – non-assessed and not included in the word count
  • Feedback from external partner(s) at the Ideas for Impact event.
  • Confirmation from the student that their reflective report is accurate and correctly identifies their contributions within the team.

Further information about the assessments can be found in the Course Syllabus.

Feedback

Students will receive formative and summative feedback in a variety of ways, written (e.g. marked up on assignments, through email or the VLE) or oral (e.g. as part of interactive teaching sessions or in office hours).

Indicative Reading

Note: Comprehensive and current reading lists are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative reading list provided below is for a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

• Noveck, Beth (2021) Solving Public Problems: A Practical Guide to Fix Our Government and Change Our World. Yale University Press.
• Heath, C. & Heath, D. (2007) Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. Random House.
• Tannenbaum and Salas (2020) Teams That Work: The Seven Drivers of Team Effectiveness. Oxford University Press.

Indicative Topics

Note: Comprehensive and current topics for courses are produced annually in the Course Syllabus or other documentation provided to students; the indicative topics provided below is used as a general guide and part of the approval/modification process only.

This course emphasises learning by doing and encourages students to draw on their diverse individual knowledge and skills to help address a complex wider-world challenge.

The main theoretical focus is to support the development of problem-solving, communication, and teamwork skills, covering topics such as:

Problem Solving

• Defining a problem
• Partnership requirements and opportunities
• Ethical and social factors
• Rapid evidence review

Teamworking

• Team purpose and planning
• Roles and responsibilities
• Mindsets and behaviours
• Collective intelligence

Communication

• Professional communication techniques
• Writing skills across different audiences and document types