Designing a Virtual Learning Environment to Promote Collaborative Creativity in University Students

Abstract

Creativity is valuable to humanity, so different governments have sought to promote it through education. Despite these efforts, educational models are based on traditional methods that hinder creativity. It is essential to design environments that promote creative potential through the context characteristics and the agents’ perspectives involved. Based on educational design research, we set up a virtual learning environment that promotes collaborative creativity in university students. We carried out the research in an annual course on educational psychology, where students organized into teams developed creative proposals for intervention. We iterated this course with four generations of students (n=81), in which the prototype of the virtual environment was designed, implemented, and evaluated. We evaluated the prototype from two dimensions: 1) the creativity perceived in the intervention proposals; 2) the collaboration that arose in the virtual learning environment. We observed that the most creative proposals corresponded to those made by the last generation. Likewise, the students who interacted the most with digital tools were those from the same cohort. We concluded that to promote creativity, it is essential that the environment is characterized by having digital tools familiar to the student, encourages everyone’s creativity, fosters dialogue, provides clarity regarding creative tasks, and that the teacher advises the process.