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Food Innovation Lab goes digital

by Lucie Rejman & Judith Wemmer, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, 29 April 2020
Submit Your Story!
20 students. 12 experts. 8 weeks. 5 ideas. 2 lecturers. And just one solution: digitalization.

Bye-bye post-its, hello digital world!

When we collected the post-its from our last lecture at the Student Project House before switching to the digital space due to Covid-19, we felt uncertain about how a lecture with focus on teamwork, prototyping and testing would work in the digital space. Little did we know that a few weeks down the line, our students would have transformed their kitchens at home into prototyping spaces. They are more than happy that they can finally use as many (digital) post-its as they want whilst not wasting paper; and instead of talking to users in person, they have picked up their phones to call them or conduct surveys. We - this is Lucie and Judith - recently finished our PhDs in Food Process Engineering and felt the big wish to enrich the Food Science curriculum with a lecture on the topic of innovation. Our lecture, called the Food Innovation Lab, aims at guiding student teams through an innovation process where they learn to develop their own ideas to tackle the global challenges of our food system. It is supported by Innovedum, a fund for innovative teaching formats set up by Rector Prof. Dr. Sarah Springman (if you ever feel like implementing a novel lecture, you may submit your proposal on September and March 1st of any given year).
Bye bye post-its: Our last used physical post-its before switching to digital post-its on Mural (photo credit: Lucie Rejman)

Tips & tricks for lectures

Transferring our lecture into the digital space was only possible thanks to a wealth of highly recommendable tools such as Zoom, a video conference software which we probably all know by now :-). The break-out sessions function is particularly recommended for sub-team discussions, although we are also aware of Zoom-bombing and other security issues. We also used Mural for online brainstorming sessions without wasting post-its; Miro for online whiteboards; Trello to create individual or team to do list; Mentimeter for feedback and voting results in real-time; and of course blogs.ethz.ch, a great tool for students to reflect their learnings and share their experiences.

What truly helped for a smooth transition was an open feedback culture with our students. Independent of holding a lecture in the digital space or in person, we believe that expectation management and co-creation enrich the learning journey and increase satisfaction of our students and us. This means, clearly state what you as a lecturer expect from the students, listen to the students to hear what they expect to learn, and give them the chance to continuously leave feedback and bring in their experience and ideas to improve the lecture. You might think that this is too time-consuming, but even tiny adaptations can make your students more engaged.
Photo credit: Lucie Rejman
Photo credit: Lucie Rejman
Photo credit: Lucie Rejman

Our future generation

Seeing how our students adapted to the new situation makes us very hopeful for the future. A future where our students will become leaders. And our leaders will feel passionate to generate and implement innovative solutions to the most pressing global challenges - a skill particularly needed in times like this.

Our biggest thanks thus go to YOU: Dylan, Fabienne, Alice, Sophie, Jing, Till, Isabelle, Elissar, Valentine, Lilian, Daniele, Etienne, Aline, Luc, Jan, Céline, Livia, Soo, Martin, and Meret.
Submit Your Story!
Photo credit: Lucie Rejman/Eliane Dürst & Judith Wemmer/Carmen Sirboiu

About the authors

Lucie Rejman:
The thing that keeps me busiest at the moment is: Zoom unfortunately
My favourite app is: Moldiv
One book or movie I recommend: OKR (Objectives & Key Results) by John Doer
And if all else fails, my instant pick-me-up is: My inflatable pink bathtub & a chai latte

Judith Wemmer:
The thing that keeps me most busy at the moment is: Producing planted.chicken
My favourite app is: Twint
One book or movie I recommend: Moonrise Kingdom
And if all else fails, my instant pick-me-up is: friendly social interactions :-D

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