ACC Creative Collaborator Labs

Overview

ACC’s Creative Collaborator Labs—known also as creative co-labs—are a student-driven, faculty-supported tool for fostering learning through collaboration across classes and disciplines. The co-location of many creative programs at the Highland Campus inspired the development of an intentional support system for collaboration across courses, disciplines, and programs.

Accomplishments

• Approximately 320 Arts & Digital Media (ADM) students have collaborated on over 55 cross-class projects since the program started in fall 2021, with more students finishing up in the spring 2023 semester.
• Cross-class collaborations can incorporate any form of project, from a music video to a virtual reality production.
• Highlights include media projects bringing together students across the Drama, Radio-TV-Film, Music Business, and Animation areas. Many of these projects are shared on the co-labs site under “completed projects” (password: riverbatscolab).

Impact

Collaboration is at the heart of practically every industry, and is a cornerstone of success in creative industries, from graphic design to game development. Learning and applying interdisciplinary collaborative skills in the co-lab project-based environment helps prepare students for the realities of the professional world.

Co-lab students sign a “Collaboration Agreement” agreeing to practice crucial collaboration tenets developed by faculty and crucial for industry success. These tenets are reinforced across the curriculum throughout the semester as wide-ranging interdisciplinary projects take shape and come to life!

Next Steps

• Position branding and develop the infrastructure/site for the faculty-driven collaboration piece of the co-labs with ADM departments. Faculty themselves would be able to put out “collaboration calls” across departments, and through the system be matched up where appropriate. Interdisciplinary partnerships would be co-created and built into the syllabus of each respective class.
• Pilot program for faculty-driven co-labs in classes to include creating a constantly evolving database of new “collaboration syllabi” for future use and iterations by other faculty moving forward.
• Celebrate completed projects/student work. Evolve best practices and expand the program.
• As appropriate with interested divisions, invite other divisions/faculty to post projects for both student-driven co-labs and faculty-driven co-labs.

Bigger picture potential: Develop a collegewide collaboration and innovation ecosystem. To support the further breaking down of silos across the college, assign collaboration/innovation release time roles in each division to drive integrated cross-college co-labs using the above model/ecosystem and beyond. In addition, monthly meetings of all co-lab division leaders to discover appropriate projects would further cultivate the collaboration mentality/infrastructure, and lead to the creation of targeted interdisciplinary co-lab projects across ACC.