Co-creation processes are crucial in education, both as tools for pedagogical innovation and to address higher education institutions' social responsibility. This chapter presents a project that took place at the Polytechnic of Leiria, as part of a broader initiative that brought together 13 Portuguese Polytechnic Institutions, the Portuguese government, and Demola Global. This project considered this type of collaborative network particularly important in the role HEIs have in transforming society and describes the co-creation process and analyses its methodology through the lens of how this initiative brings together the educational opportunities and social responsibility of HEIs with the affordances of pedagogical innovation tools.
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As in many societal spheres, HEIs have been facing several challenges such as the rising costs of education, decreasing resources in institutions, the declining number of students, globalisation and the increasing competition among institutions at a global level. In a post-pandemic world, after HEIs transformed themselves and their learning practices and environments in record time, they now need to address the challenges posed by emerging technologies and environments themselves. Times of crisis usually lead to disruptive changes and higher education institutions may no longer return to their traditional role of (more or less) passively transmit and certify knowledge or act as single knowledge experts. According to Mulder (2011, p. 8), “Universities may have changed over the years, but their role has changed little: (1) provide knowledge content, (2) offer a learning community that can help students understand the meaning of this content, and (3) certify students who prove that they have mastered this knowledge”. Among the drivers of change we may also include global economic and social forces that, together with sustainability issues, make it crucial for institutions to find their own path towards innovation, collaboration, transparency and openness, in order to meet the demands of an increasingly international and connected market and society.
Through its OECD Education 2030 project, the OECD is also turning to HEIs to help societies respond to environmental, economic and social changes in a rapidly changing world. In its “The future of education and skills Education 2030” report (2019), the OECD stated that “to prepare for 2030, people should be able to think creatively, develop new products and services, new jobs, new processes and methods, new ways of thinking and living, new enterprises, new sectors, new business models and new social models. Increasingly, innovation springs not from individuals thinking and working alone, but through cooperation and collaboration with others to draw on existing knowledge to create new knowledge.”
So, what is innovation and how does it apply to the field of education and specifically pedagogies?