Fanshawe College
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

The Innovation Village has established the Fanshawe Innovation Fund as an internal funding mechanism to foster and accelerate innovation within the college and our communities. The fund will advance Fanshawe College's vision of working together to create the best learning/student experience, immense community impact, and foster an innovative culture. It seeks to empower staff and faculty to continually seek novel solutions to the real problems faced by our students, college, and community. Faculty received funding to pitch their sustainability+ projects and ideas.  Fifteen projects were initially accepted and received Spark and Surge Funding from the Innovation Fund in the spring of 2023.

Guidance on incorporating sustainability into existing courses exists within the Centre for Academic Excellence and SILEx as Quick Reference Guides (QRG). Each of the 7 Job Skills for the Future QRGs has the Relationship to Essential Employability Skills & United Nations Sustainability Development Goals SDGs. 

Open Educational Resources Grant Program: provides funding and support to faculty interested in adapting or creating Open Educational Resources (OER).

Incentives:

• funding
• release time
• professional development opportunities
• research opportunities

Innovation Fund Outcomes:

• What Do T- Shirts and Kombucha Have in Common? 
  • This project addresses textile waste by converting 100% cotton waste into glucose for use in fermentation processes. The goal is to create a sustainable and circular ecosystem, positioning Fanshawe College as a hub for innovative solutions to textile waste.
• Doing Deathcare Differently: Enhancing literacy, education and access in community-based palliative doula care. 
  • This project aims to improve community-based palliative care by integrating doulas into the care process. Objectives include assessing death literacy and coping among health professional students, developing a learning module and simulation, evaluating the effectiveness of doulas in palliative care, and organizing community dialogues to exchange knowledge and showcase palliative care programs at Fanshawe College. 
• Village Creative
  • This project involves creating a digital advertising agency where students from various programs collaborate on projects for local entrepreneurs and national non-profits. Services offered include user testing, social media plans, CRM system builds, SEO audits, website design, and paid media campaigns. The agency will focus on supporting small businesses, newcomers to London, and Indigenous communities
• Shred, Make, Use, Repeat: A local closed loop plastic recycling SOLUTION
  • This innovation project looks at a “Shred, Make, Use, Repeat” approach - an alternative grassroots local plastic recycling system where ordinary plastic waste is transformed into valuable raw material and new products. We will repurpose the plastic waste from our regional college campus and produce something useful and beautiful.  This will be a scalable, iterative strategy to make a local college recycling program technically and economically feasible, a model that can easily be transferred to all Fanshawe campuses and locations. This innovative approach would establish Fanshawe College as the first post-secondary institution in Canada to take care of its own plastic waste: Shred, Make, Use, Repeat.
• The Poppy Project
  • Fanshawe College’s Poppy Project focuses on creating sustainable poppies locally. This project has an innovative, multi-faceted impact on society, veterans, youth, college students, and local businesses. This year, funds will be used to ensure our sustainable poppies continue to grow and blossom by expanding the project even further, making it an annual practice at Fanshawe College, Canada’s first Military-connected college

OER Grant Outcomes:

Outcomes:

• OER Exploring Nature
• OER Indigenous Life Design