Stimulating Creativity in Online Learning Environments through Intelligent Fast Failure

In this paper, we address the stimulation of creativity in online learning environments through our examination of a simple hands-on task aimed at teaching the principles of Intelligent Fast Failure (IFF) in the context of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) focused on creativity, innovation, and change. A simple physical “prototyping” exercise involving common household objects was designed and presented to a global community of online learners using the Coursera MOOC platform. Data gathered from the task outcomes and student reflections were analyzed with respect to gender and cultural differences, as well as correlations between the number of attempts/failures and creative performance metrics. Our results show that while the correlation between number of attempts (i.e., failure rate) and creative performance was statistically significant, the relationship was weak. In addition to these and other quantitative results, this research has value for engineering educators as a case study in the evolution, scaling, and transfer of face-to-face experiential learning tasks to global online learning environments.