University Global Impact Exchange

How can universities equip students with 21st-century skills where students graduate with a strong portfolio of design, co-creation, and leadership projects? How can digital collaboration make transnational impact projects accessible to everyone? 

About the Program

The University Global Impact Exchange Program is an innovative initiative that brings together universities and their partners to co-create transnational impact initiatives. The program fosters collaboration among universities to design curricular, co-listed, student-led, social impact projects around the world. By providing a platform for cross-university projects, we aim to empower students to tackle real-world challenges while learning essential collaboration skills from their counterparts across different academic institutions.

How it Works

• Social Labs: Universities participating in the program come together to identify pressing social issues within their communities. Collaboratively, they design student-led projects that align with the needs and priorities of the local context.

• Course Co-Listing: Through the co-listing mechanism, students from different universities can join forces to work on shared projects. This process allows students to experience diverse perspectives, cultures, and academic approaches, enhancing their ability to work effectively in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary settings.

• Skill Development: While addressing social impact challenges, students will also develop critical skills such as communication, teamwork, leadership, and problem-solving. These skills are crucial for personal growth and future employability.

Key Features

• Meaningful Social Impact: Projects in the program are carefully crafted to address real community needs. By engaging in hands-on projects, students make a positive and lasting impact on society.

• Multi-disciplinary co-creation: The program encourages students from various academic disciplines to collaborate, fostering a rich learning environment and encouraging out-of-the-box thinking.

• Design Thinking: Teams use Design Thinking methodologies to systematically understand systemic problems related to an issue and co-design solutions with users. 

• Mentorship and Guidance: Each project is overseen by experienced faculty mentors who provide guidance, support, and expertise to ensure the projects' success.

• Networking Opportunities: Students have the chance to build a network of like-minded individuals, academics, and professionals working towards similar goals in different communities.

• Showcasing Achievements: Successful projects and their outcomes will be showcased to potential employers, partners, and funding agencies, providing visibility to students' impactful work.

Social Labs / Co-creation Labs

Social Labs or Co-creation Labs are shared platforms for co-creating solutions to complex social problems and have three core characteristics (Hassan, 2014):

1. They are social. Social labs start by bringing together diverse participants to work in a team that acts collectively. They are ideally drawn from different sectors of society, such as government, civil society, and the business community. The participation of diverse stakeholders beyond consultation, as opposed to teams of experts or technocrats, represents the social nature of social labs.

2. They are experimental. Social labs are not one-off experiences. They’re ongoing and sustained efforts. The team doing the work takes an iterative approach to the challenges it wants to address, prototyping interventions and managing a portfolio of promising solutions. This reflects the experimental nature of social labs, as opposed to the project-based nature of many social interventions.

3. They are systemic. The ideas and initiatives developing in social labs, released as prototypes, aspire to be systemic in nature. This means trying to come up with solutions that go beyond dealing with a part of the whole or symptoms and address the root cause of why things are not working in the first place.

Source: The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach to Solving our Most Complex Challenges by Zaid Hassan (2014)

Co-listing a Course

Co-listing (also known as co-convening or dual-listing) of courses is the process of converging some or all of the learning experiences of students from two separate courses to allow for more interaction between students and expanding the opportunities for students to be exposed to instruction at a more challenging level. Intructors who want to co-list a course have to put in significant effort into designing the co-listed course, especially at the start.

Click here to learn more about the co-listing program. 

Join the University Impact Exchange Program

If you are a university looking to strengthen your social impact initiatives and promote cross-university collaboration, we invite you to become part of the University Impact Exchange Program. By joining hands with other institutions, you can create a more significant and sustainable change in the communities you serve.

If you are a student eager to make a difference and develop essential collaboration skills, this program is the perfect platform for you. Work with peers from diverse backgrounds, gain valuable experience, and make an impact that matters.

Contact Us

This initiative is a collaboration between Humanitarian Engineering, Entrepreneurship, and Design (HEED), Design Thinkers Academy SCII, the Planetary Regenerative Leadership Initiative, and the Education Impact Lab.

To learn more about the University Impact Exchange Program and how your university can get involved, or if you are a student interested in participating, please contact us at uix@eduimpactlab.com .

Take a step towards shaping a brighter future for communities and students alike. Join the University Impact Exchange Program today!