Living Labs – Better Student Outcomes through Sustainability - Living Lab Guide – Key Learnings - A Trouble Shooting Guide to Challenges and Solutions

Common Themes

This section draws out key learnings, common challenges and advice from staff working in UK tertiary education institutions. The basis of these were derived from the sector survey on applied learning and research practices and aspiration in UK tertiary education married with interviews with key staff members who provided the documented case studies of approaches to applied teaching, learning and research.

Given that in many instances Living Labs are often being led by staff who have a personal commitment to such applied teaching, learning and research approaches[1], it has been identified that gaining institutional buy-in and support is critical to ensuring a long-term commitment to developing these opportunities.

Challenges:

• Measuring impact
• Time
  • To facilitate partnerships
  • To support students
  • To engage with teaching staff
• Implementation: Going beyond campus and community being ‘test beds’
• Resourcing: staff and funding
• Gaining high level executive support – influencing institutional priorities
• Engagement: Reaching stakeholders
• Creating a culture of partnership working: breaking down silos

Top Tips:

• Communication
• Networking
• Relationship building
• Work with key influencers internally and externally
• Development of Living Labs often happens organically, and this should be celebrated
• Finding seeds of existing engagement with Living Labs happening organically to share institutional examples

Developing such whole-institution engagement to tackle sustainability challenges takes time and on-going work. Increasing awareness and working

The common challenges and solutions below provide a brief trouble shooting guide based on the experiences of institutional staff in the sector. Each ‘solution’ has a relevant case study connected with it – please see previous section of case studies for more information.

[1] Based on survey findings from Education in Sustainability survey 2018 – see page 8