“We have to step up our game’: NIC’s new program teaches ‘transformational’ thinking

Everything starts with a problem in North Idaho College’s X-Labs.

Then students, professors, community leaders and employers come together to create solutions.

X-Labs is the brainchild of NIC President Nick Swayne, who launched a program of the same name at James Madison University, where he worked before arriving in Coeur d’Alene. X-Labs is a program that teaches students to collaborate to solve real-world issues through fellowships, events, and now a general education course set to launch at NIC in the spring.

“People often will say, don’t go to school to study something; find your passion. Well, what does that actually mean?” Swayne said. “Everything has expectations. Here’s how you’re going to get graded, and what we’ve never introduced them to is ambiguousness and problem-solving.”

The problems X-Labs tries to tackle aren’t ones with easy answers, from homelessness to how local businesses use artificial intelligence.

“There may not be a right answer,” Swayne said. “That’s a first for many of these kids.”

Developing a curiosity mindset When Blake Sanchez heard about the burgeoning X-Labs program at NIC, he had “no idea” what it was.

Sanchez was student body president at the time. Marita Diffenbaugh, the college’s director of innovation, sought out Sanchez to be one of X-lab’s first University Innovation Fellows, part of a Stanford Program of the same name.

The year-long program was “transformational,” Sanchez said. With a team of fellow students, Sanchez met with dozens of business leaders to discover how they use artificial intelligence in their work and what students should know about AI to get hired.

Those responses were developed into seven questions that students attempted to solve during a day-long event. The groups then pitched their solutions back to a panel of business leaders. The event, one of X-labs’ first, was called the AI Hackathon. It was a huge success, Diffenbaugh said.

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Sanchez calls himself a “true believer” in the X-Labs process. He traveled to the Netherlands for a summit that brought together University Innovation Fellows from across the globe and now serves as the director of experiential learning for the University of Idaho’s student body government.

“If you truly participate and you give yourself to this program and you put in the work, you’ll develop a mindset of curiosity,” Sanchez said. “Seeking to understand how things work, how they’re connected, and how you’re a part of it.”

‘Where lecture meets lab’ Over the last year, Diffenbaugh has run X-Lab events and overseen the first group of fellows, but a core piece of the program remains under construction.

The X-Labs space, located in the Hedlund Building, is scheduled to be completed in December. The remodel of an old diesel bay was already approved before Swayne’s arrival, and he reworked the project to become X-Labs. The remodel cost about $2 million.

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The first X-Labs general education course will launch in the spring. A group of instructors will teach the interdisciplinary course, where students with different academic focuses will collaborate to solve a problem.

The goal is to connect classroom learning to real-world problems that students care about.

“Let’s connect you with something that matters to you individually, and this problem is big enough that it matters to us as a community,” Diffenbaugh said. “Then we find a way so everybody has a part to play in that.”

So far, nine faculty members are design leads, Diffenbaugh said. They’re learning how to collaborate and teach together. The syllabus for the class is the problem-solving process, but the topic will change each semester.

For example, at James Madison University, instructors taught a class on solving homelessness. The students interviewed area experts and nonprofit leaders, then workshopped solutions.

Some solutions might require a physical prototype, like a tiny home, while others might be policy suggestions. The college will also offer a first-year seminar that takes on smaller-scale problem solving.

The course will bring in both area employers and experts, Diffenbaugh said.

“We have a lot of people who would love to be part of mentoring, and that helps infuse all the things that they bring to the community,” Diffenbaugh said. “We have a venue for that.”

The program also teaches soft skills like communication, collaboration and the ability to take and implement feedback.

“It’s kind of like where lecture meets lab,” Diffenbaugh said. “You’re in that space co-designing and building something, which truly matches those employability, durable skills that we know we need when we are not in college.”

The program is located in the same building as the robotics lab that the college shares with the University of Idaho, and X-labs has already been a space to collaborate with NIC’s closest four year university. Bringing the X-labs model to NIC is key to Swayne’s goal of making the community college competitive with nearby four-year universities.

“If you can only get this experience at a larger university, why would you go to a community college?” Swayne said. “So we have to step up our game. We’re smaller. We’re more nimble. We should be able to do these kinds of things.”

“We have to step up our game’: NIC’s new program teaches ‘transformational’ thinking

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