Welcome to BIF’s Student Experience Lab. As champions for audacious change, our mission is to channel the voice of the student into action by building a real-world, collaborative innovation platform to help education transform itself. We invite you to join us on this epic adventure.
Learn MoreCheck out some of the activities going on in the lab.
What if we put students in the driver’s seat of a new kind of R&D to transform higher education? One that provided a platform for engaging students more fully in a real world effort that also involved faculty, and university administrators? Could we improve a student’s education experience? Yes. Could we take it a step further and transform higher education itself? Yes.
The Student Experience Lab partnered with the College Board to better understand and develop opportunities to enhance the educational experiences of young men of color. By engaging young male Asian American/Pacific Islanders, African Americans, Hispanic/Latinos, and Native Americans directly to understand how they view their experiences, we add their important voice to the innovation discussion of how to better meet their needs, improve their experience and lead them toward degree attainment.
Here's what we believe: The current U.S. post-secondary education system does not deliver, at sufficient scale or affordable price, a high-quality college experience that prepares all students with the skills they need to fully participate in the 21st century global economy. With this problem in mind, the Student Experience Lab set to map the environmental and human factors that are the most significant drivers of the college student experience.
News, views, and student voices from the Student Experience Lab
On October 29, 2011, 40 students, ages 12-22, traveled from all corner’s of Rhode Island’s public education system, to answer one simple question: can we create a student experience that enables all students to thrive? Their insights and passion for the design challenge will inspire you.
An ongoing mechanism of change delivering the voices and experiences of students nationwide. Learn more
To be truly "student-centered" requires a deep understanding of the student experience. In this short video, Rhode Island students share reasons why they go to school in the first place - from their desire to succeed, to becoming role models for others, to setting themselves up for a better life. Their insights should catalyze all schools to question their own student-centricity and begin to grapple with long-held value systems. Only through understanding the "why" will we get to place to re-create the "what" and "how" of innovation in education.
Call this insightful foreshadowing: 2012 will be the year students and families earnestly ponder the question of whether a college-degree is worth it. We had an opportunity to spend some time with Dale Stephens at BIF's annual innovation summit. Dale is a Thiel Scholarship recipient - the program that launched in April by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who offered a couple dozen students scholarships to drop out of college and put their entrepreneurial skills to work. Dale's plan? He created "UnCollege," where students direct their own learning, seek out their own mentors, and "hack their education" in a way that personally suits them. Sound interesting? Watch the video.
“The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” -Victor Hugo. This profound insight was delivered to us by Shaun Robinson, a Northeastern Law student who shared his story at the BIF-7 Collaborative Innovation Summit in October, 2011. We share this through The Insight Engine because Shaun is a role model, a catalyst, a transformation artist for us all, no matter your age or circumstance. Interested in behavior change? Watch Shaun's video story.
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