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Human Skills for a Digital World

Creativity, Problem Solving and Design Thinking

Emily Tannert Patterson, Senior Learning Designer, Cambridge Online Education

Association for Learning Technology 2025 Annual Conference

I’m here today to talk to you about our experiences developing and delivering the course Creativity, Problem Solving and Design Thinking on the Cambridge Advance Online platform. I was the learning designer for the course and so I want to acknowledge that I’m just one of a team which includes graphics, media, editing and technical development members, and of course, our University of Cambridge academic course lead, Professor Nathan Crilly.

My goal today is not just to show you, but hopefully help you experience in miniature, the metacognitive approach we take to improving creativity, and how we use the online setting to help us do so. I will ask you to do things as we go along and I appreciate you being a good sport and engaging with the activities we’ll do; I promise they’re not too onerous. You’ll need some kind of way to jot your ideas down, whether pen and paper, a notes-taking app, or whatever you feel comfortable with, so feel free to get that out now if you need to while I’m talking.

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Why teach creativity?

Source: World Economic Forum. (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025.

But first a bit of context: this course was developed in response to the growing recognition that creativity is an essential skill across all sectors and across all levels: for example, the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report lists creative thinking as one its top 10 core skills for 2025 and beyond. (On the left you can see this list of the top 10 core skills; on the right you can see the survey data of the share of employers surveyed who consider each of these skills to be core skills for their workforce. There’s a great deal more data in the WEF’s Future of Jobs report, which you can download free from the WEF website.) It’s interesting to note that 7 of the top 8 skills fall into the areas of cognitive skills, self-efficacy, and working with others – not anything to do with big data, AI, technology, and etc; So clearly there are plenty of people out there who still value the skills that humans bring to the table, however, these are also skills which are often not taught or perhaps not emphasized in school or within the traditional primary and secondary education system. And so as educators we have to ensure we are adequately preparing people to perform adequately within a workplace that is experiencing the upheavals of the current age. And clearly a key skill here is creativity.

So this recognition of creativity as a key skill has given rise to increased demand for training in creative skills, and our course aims to meet that demand by giving learners a range of experiences that enhance their creative abilities and creative confidence.

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Creativity:

Creative idea = novel + appropriate

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Metacognition:

thinking about thinking

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