Open Lab—An Innovative Model to Increase Students’ Civic Engagement

Abstract

Higher education institutions have faced several challenges which strengthened their cooperation to share and learn from other institutions’ practices; many of the new actions are social responsibility related. The Open Lab is an innovative model of individual and institutional engagement with the major scope of managing local needs-based projects capable of generating positive impact in the local community. Students in general, and student unions, in particular, run several projects in which students get themselves volunteered. Learning from working in projects is considered service learning, a different and innovative approach with multiple benefits for students who become engaged learners, for higher education institutions which run and partner in local projects with different entities, and for communities which are the final beneficiaries. The aim of this paper is to explore the Open Lab as an innovative model to increase students’ civic engagement. The study focuses on the students’ awareness of the Open Lab opportunities and provides solutions to increase the Open Lab awareness. The research is based on the literature review on Open Lab related concepts, higher education current challenges, and innovative models, and on a survey addressed to students to reveal their understanding of this approach. The main results show that although the students’ awareness of the Open Lab’s opportunities is low, the students’ willingness to get engaged is high and that the students’ engagement level is correlated with opportunities communication and motivation effectiveness. The findings demonstrate that communication and motivation mechanisms would be solutions to increase the effectiveness of the Open Lab.