We now have approximately 14,000 students signed up for the Crash Course on Creativity, and that number is growing daily. Participants come from all over the world! Feel free to invite your friends, family, and colleagues to join us at venture-lab.stanford.edu/creativity.

Here are more details about the course: 

• Schedule: The course runs from Wed, Oct 17 - Friday, Dec 7, 2012. New lectures will be posted on Wednesdays, and assignments are due the following Tuesday.

• Workload: Expect to spend between 1 - 5 hours a week on the course.

• Technical Requirements: You will need a computer that allows you to watch the video lectures, and the ability to upload your assignments, which will be images, videos, slides, and text. You will also be required to collaborate with teammates via email, Skype, and other free online tools.

• Prerequisites: This is an introductory course designed for anyone, anywhere in the world. There are no prerequisites. It would be helpful to have basic skills taking digital photos, creating slide, presentations, and creating short videos for your homework submissions.

• Course Content: The course is designed to introduce you to a set of tools for generating new ideas individually and as part of a team, including opportunity identification, reframing problems, connecting and combining ideas, and challenging assumptions. We will also discuss team dynamics, creative communication, and cultures that support creative problem solving.

• Team Projects: There are several short team projects in the course. You can bring your own team or we will create one for you. Before each project we will ask you for your preferences.

• Evaluation: Because this course focuses on creativity, evaluation of the projects is necessarily subjective. Our goal is to make sure that you get thoughtful feedback on your submissions and to showcase the most creative solutions for each challenge. To do this, the entire class will be involved in providing feedback on the assignments. The more projects you review, the more feedback you receive on your project. Also, you will be getting guidance and feedback on your evaluations in order to make sure they are as accurate and constructive as possible. The projects that are the most highly rated will be showcased on the course home page.

To get your creative juices flowing, here are some video clips from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program's ECorner Collection.

• Changing the World through Innovation, by Stanford President John Hennessy

• Ideas Come from Everywhere, by Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!

• Orbiting the Giant Hairball, by Tom Kelley, Managing Director of IDEO

• In case you haven't seen it, here is a talk I gave on my philosophy of teaching creativity. Enjoy!

Creativity Rules!

-Tina Seelig