When I started to prepare my teaching material, I thought that students may be bored of just watching videos all the time. I wanted to incorporate something where, just because it was different, would surprise students and keep them motivated. In the previous years, I have found a real challenge to get students engaged during the course due to the variety of backgrounds students have and the large cohort size. This is an introductory course to innovation management and it is not required previous knowledge so students could consider this is an abstract topic due to the lack of familiarity.

I prepared all teaching material using Adobe Spark Page. The content material guides students through the theory, by instructing when to introduce additional reading, watch a video or work in an activity/test (linked to BlackBoard for summative feedback through quizzes, VT, etc.). Each Adobe Spark page is an interactive ‘notebook’ where students have access to all the material in a single space. This facilitates the navigation, finding the materials, deadlines, etc. Adobe Spark allows complementing text with images, attracting students’ attention as though they were reading a blog page.

Click the image to view a Spark page from this course:

Students acknowledge the material created, the effort needed to type the text instead of recording videos and having all the materials available in just one click. They have provided ‘informal’ feedback to me after lectures and the scores for the course in the Unit surveys have been high. I found Adobe Spark a very useful tool to present key theoretical concepts as a summary of the main readings while leaving face to face sessions for Q&As and the discussion of case studies.

School: Alliance Manchester Business School

Discipline: Innovation, Management and Entrepreneurship

Academic: Mabel Sanchez Barrioluengo

Course: BMAN73112

Cohort Size: 100+ (PGT)

Themes: Teaching Ideas, Active learning

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