Reimagine Education 2016

Coriolanus Online (the project’s original iteration) received the gold award in the Arts & Humanities category of the third annual Reimagine Education Awards 2016, a yearlong global competition designed to uncover transformative initiatives across the Higher Education sector. The competition, which is known as the Oscars of HE, attracted 807 submissions from 56 countries and only 140 were shortlisted. An international panel of 40 experts evaluated the projects based on three main criteria: innovation, impact or scalability.

The project, also shortlisted in the Hybrid Learning category, received the Arts & Humanities gold award “because of the way in which it assists the development of pedagogies suitable for innovative international learning – pedagogy that allows groups of students to exchange and create knowledge without having to do so within a presence learning framework.” In particular, the project provides theatre students at Coventry University and Tampere University (Finland) with an opportunity to work together and participate in rehearsals using video-conferencing enabled telepresence.

The co-directors of the project – Dr Tom Gorman, Dr Mikko Kanninen and Dr Tiina Syrja – gave a presentation at the event where the winners were announced: the 2016 Reimagine Education Conference, organised by The Wharton School – SEI Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and QS Quacquarelli Symonds, compiler of the QS World University Rankings. The conference attracted 400 international delegates and featured panel debates from 40 inspirational speakers including Jonathan Rochelle, Director of Product Management at Google, Rob Curtin Director Higher Education, Worldwide Public Sector at Microsoft, Prof. Martin Seligman, founder of Positive Psychology and Dr. Satya Nitta, Global Head and Program Director of Cognitive Science and Education Technology, IBM Research. The conference also featured presentations from a number of this year’s shortlisted applicants, allowing attendees to gain first-hand access to those at the forefront of educational change.

The silver and bronze awards in the Arts & Humanities category went to Reality Ends Here (University of Southern California, United States) and SMU-X: Transforming Presence-Based Learning for a New Generation of Graduates (Singapore Management University).

Mikko Kanninen, Quacquarelli Symonds, Tom Gorman, Tiina Syrja, Jon Constable

Reimagine Education 2018

In November 2018, the project was awarded the Gold for best Arts and Humanities project and Gold for Hybrid Learning at the Reimagine Education Awards held at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco. The project also made the final 10 top scoring projects just missing out on the overall award to the excellent (and well deserved winner) Peerwise. The 2018 competition had 1,184 projects from 39 countries that were evaluated by 160 judges from the worlds of education, ed-tech and industry and the team were honoured to receive these accolades and compete in such a prestigious competition.