Formative feedback in digital lofts: Learning environments for real world innovation

Civic innovators design real-world solutions to societal problems. Teaching civic innovation presents serious challenges in classroom orchestration because facilitators must manage a complex learning environment (which may include community partners, open-ended problems and long time scales) and cannot rely on traditional classroom orchestration techniques (such as fixed schedules, pre-selected topics and simplified problems). Here we consider how digital lofts-online learning environments for civic innovation might overcome orchestration challenges through the use of badges, cases, crowd-feedback, semiautomatically created instruction, self-assessment triggered group instruction, social media, and credentialing. Together these features create three types of feedback loops: a crowd critique loop in which learners receive formative feedback on their innovation work from a broader community, a case development loop in which examples of student work are semi-automatically created to provide instruction, and a learner-driven instructional loop, in which self-assessments determine which group instruction is provided. Researching and developing digital lofts will help us to understand how to support real-world innovation across design disciplines such as engineering, policy, writing and even science; and result in technologies for disseminating and scaling civic innovation education more broadly.