Improve student learning outcomes and purposively reduce educators’ workload with our fully customisable collective critical thinking & collaborative creative problem-solving platform.

Our CBL Experiences

custom-designed for your specific module content
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Click to Reveal Examples of Module-Specific Challenges icon
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“CBL is an experience where learning takes place through identification, analysis, and collaborative design of a sustainable and responsive solution to a sociotechnical problem of which both the problem and outcomes are open.........CBL both deepens disciplinary knowledge and stimulates 21st century skills such as self-awareness, self-leadership, teamwork, and an entrepreneurial mindset”

Van den Beemt A., MacLeod M., Van der Veen J. (2020)

Why These CBL Tools Work

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Significant Improvement in Student Learning Outcomes

Foster Today’s 2 Most In-Demand Skills* - the goal of our challenges is to foster critical thinking & collaborative creative problem-solving skills* amongst our modern digital native students.

Practice Proven Problem-Solving Methodologies - we combine learning science, UX design and proven problem-solving pedagogies to co-create unforgettable, real-world, immersive learning experiences. These on-demand, self-paced, social & gamified learning opportunities empower students to learn by doing and deepen their knowledge via active, experiential assignments.

Engrossing, Immersive Iterative Learning Tools - smart tech features including a smart interactive whiteboard, our trained, pre-prompted GenAI interface and peer-to-peer algorithms significantly boost student engagement.

*The World Economic Forum, The Jobs of the Future Report 2023 finds critical / analytical thinking, creative thinking and AI will be top in-demand skills by 2027

Purposeful Reduction in Educators Workload

Seamless integration of CBL experiences - our VLE-integrated platform fully supports problem-solving challenges, allowing faculty to focus their time on sharing their subject matter expertise.

Time-Saving Student Communications - Our multichannel communications student instruction and query system eliminates admin time in running challenges-based assignments.

Effortless Student Progress Tracking - With the 1-Click "CBL Tracker Dashboard," educators can easily monitor student progress and compare team submissions in real-time.

Streamlined Assessment & Data Analytics - The "CBL Assessment & Outcomes Analytics Dashboard" simplifies the assessment process providing in-depth analytics for the educator and a personalised challenge report for each student.

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How it Works

  • Week 0
    Week 1
    Week 2
    Week 3
  • Week 0
  • Step 1
    prepare

    Prepare

    During a call with one of our innovation specialists we demo the challenge, consider how to best customise the challenge to suit your module content, discuss options for integrating into your module assessment or not and agree the communications strategy.

  • Week 1
  • Step 2
    Ideate

    Ideate

    Students receive a link to the challenge page, with an explainer video and guidance on how to participate. The challenge page will guide them through each step - empathise, define, ideate, test, prototype

  • Week 2
  • Step 3
    vote

    Vote

    Following the deadline for submissions, students are prompted to view all of their classmates ideas, appreciate the divergence of ideas submitted and then vote for their favourite one.

  • Step 4
    build

    Build

    After voting, students pick one idea which they can build, combine and improve on with their own creative twist. They submit their suggested improvement, which provides each team feedback on their idea.

  • Week 3
  • Step 5
    awards

    Awards & Analytics

    The winners (and honourable mentions) for the best original team idea and the best individual build idea are announced in class. Each student then receives a personalised innovation report & digital badge. The academic host receives an analytics report.

Our Innovation Challenges were adapted for & hugely valued by

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What UCD School of Biomolecular and Biomedical Science said..

With an MSc class of 165 it has been very challenging to incorporate learning activities that truly enhance students creativity and problem-solving skills. This year, with the help of Anytime Creativity, we customised a challenge focused on the current, ongoing restructuring of the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Participation rates were very high and the range & quality of ideas was superb. The voting component incentivised everyone to appreciate the diversity of ideas generated while the "build on others ideas" had students thinking in a different way. It was a brilliant experience for the students, and allowed me to integrate a much needed aspect into my module for a relatively small amount of work on my side. Highly recommended.
Craig Slattery
Assistant Professor of Regulatory Affairs & Toxicology
UCD School of Molecular & Biomedical Science
I liked that the Challenge was real-world because it made it so immersive. We had fun brainstorming so many different ideas and it made me think how we all look at problems from different perspectives. I also liked the voting because it forced me to analyse all the different ideas. It was a great Challenge and I learned loads about my creativity. Kudos all round.
Alessandra Wong Albujar
Student & Challenge Participant
UCD School of Molecular & Biomedical Science
I really enjoyed building on the ideas of others, looking through all the ideas that were submitted & thinking about how they could be improved. It forced me to think in creative ways that I don't often use. Overall the Challenge was a fresh & playful way for students to test their real-world healthcare innovation skills. Well done for arranging it.
Allison Laws
Student & Challenge Participant
UCD School of Molecular & Biomedical Science

FAQs

The best way is to make the experience part of the module assessment process for a related subject. This ensures 100% participation and will encourage students to engage fully.

Alternatively a year head, module co-ordinator or lecturer could promote the experience as an engaging, immersive way for students to have a creative impact, now or in the future, on real-world challenges.

The time spent on each experience will vary greatly, depending on the student's commitment and passion for problem-solving and whether or not it is assessed. We estimate a minimum of 3-4 hours direct commitment per student plus undirected thinking and reflection time.
  1. Idea Submission. 3-5 hours to understand the experience, gather insights, land on a problem worth solving, brainstorm multiple solutions that address the problem, choose the best solution, test, iterate and prototype.
  2. Vote. 30 minutes to think critically through the other submissions and vote for their favourite idea.
  3. Build. 30 minutes to select an idea to build on and create a twist that improves that idea.
  4. Personalised Innovation Report. 30 minutes to hours and hours depending on the students passion for creativity & innovation. The report that students receive includes links to all ideas submitted, voting results, builds as well as a range of innovation resources that will help accelerate creative mindsets and skills sets.

After your decision to facilitate a CBL Experience we estimate that your commitment will be about 1 hour, allowing you to focus on delivering academic content. The 3 key 'back-office' responsibilities are;
  1. Challenge customisation. You work with our team of innovation speacialists to create a challenge that fits your module and can deliver impactful outcomes
  2. Team formation. You might choose to do this manually in order to create diverse teams and get different students working collaboratively. Alternatively you might just select teams automatically using that function on your VLE.
  3. Class/Email Announcements. You might choose to issue emails using our templates or you can send us the class list and we will manage the communication. That's up to you.

There is no limit. From say thirty to hundreds, thousands even. Our platform is designed to easily engage large groups in CBL experiences.

Our team of innovation specialists will work with you to understand which challenge will deliver the best results for your module. Each challenge incorporates different technologies to engage students and generate a wide variety of creative ideas.

Absolutely. We have teamplate challenges, but we encourage you to customise the challenge to suit a particular theme that you are focused on within your module. For example, the UCD School of Bimolecular and Biomedical Science customised the Connect the Dots Challenge to encourage students to think about ideas that support the European Medicines Association (EMA) with their revised medicines directive and regulations.
Again, we fully are on-hand to advise on customisation.