The keynote speaker for Engage 2018 was Sir Ken Robinson, the internationally acclaimed expert on creativity and innovation in education, and author of the books Finding Your Element, The Element and Out of Our Minds.
Robinson is best-known for authoring the most watched TED Talk in history—How Schools Kill Creativity. As he explains, all children are born creative, unafraid to make mistakes. By the time they transition into adulthood—shortly before they enter higher education—they’ve had that capacity educated out of them. “They have become frightened of being wrong,” he says.
His TED series, of which the above is just the first, have been seen by an estimated 300 million people in over 150 countries. Robinson’s latest book, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education (Viking, 2015), includes groundbreaking research and tackles the critical issue of how to transform the nation’s troubled educational system. In the book, he expands on the theme of prioritizing creativity and experimentation, saying that teaching must be reinvented from the ground up to be successful in the 21st century.
At Engage 2018, Robinson’s keynote Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education from the Ground Up challenged educators to rethink their basic assumptions about intelligence and achievement, and argue that teachers need to promote creativity for students to reach their full potential. The talk also covered how education wastes more talent than it saves, and why we need to move from an industrial to an organic approach to education.
Engage 2018 was the second annual Top Hat conference for higher ed’s innovative educators, department heads and administrators. After last year’s focus on transformation through content, this year we looked at student-centered learning. From innovative course design to interactive, real-time content creation, Engage empowered attendees with the tools, strategies and insider knowledge they needed to enhance your teaching methods and raise your profile in higher education.
Other highlights of Engage 2018:
- News from experts in Open Educational Resources, instructional design, active learning and interactive educational content creation
- Workshops to improve expertise in the latest teaching techniques
- The latest teaching trends and classroom tech
- Networking with like-minded educators
Attendees also got the option to earn a Top Hat Certification in a two-to-three-hour session hosted by our team of educators and instructional designers, covering all technical aspects of Top Hat, as well as theory and practice behind classroom engagement and course authoring.
See below for how to watch Sir Ken Robinson’s keynote.
