By: Sean McNabney, Provost and Vice President, Academic, Sheridan College
I left high school to be a drummer and spent the next decade travelling with musical bands. Today, I’m the Provost at one of Canada’s largest colleges.
While my career has taken an unconventional path, one lesson has remained constant: creativity is the starting point for innovation. It shapes fulfilling lives, drives new ideas and helps solve complex challenges. For educators, the creativity imperative is creating the conditions for students to think differently across disciplines.
Building Canada’s Creative Campus
Sheridan is known to many as Canada's creative campus. And that's by design, not by happenstance. Our belief in intentional, disciplinarily agnostic creativity shapes everything we do. Our work is helping students maximize their creative potential because we know creativity is the precursor to innovation.
This philosophy has shaped not only our curriculum, but also the learning environments we create. It helped us become an Apple Distinguished School, recognized for leadership in innovation, teaching excellence and transformative learning environments using iPad, Mac and the broader Apple ecosystem across our three campuses.
In my 18 years at Sheridan, I've seen proof again and again that creativity can be taught. More than that, it must be taught. The question for educators, then, becomes: How do we create the conditions where creativity can thrive?
For us, part of the answer has been providing students with the tools and opportunities to explore alongside their peers. Sheridan's work with Apple spans more than 25 years, reflecting the values of access and enablement that sit at the heart of our approach to technology. Across our faculties and campuses, we've created learning environments where technology supports experimentation, collaboration and creative problem-solving.
Pilon School of Business
Creativity and collaboration go hand-in-hand in Sheridan’s Pilon School of Business’ marketing classrooms where the intuitive design of Mac fosters collaborative teamwork enabled through built-in apps like Microsoft, graphics software and cloud integration.
Faculty of Applied Health & Community Studies
Nursing students in the Faculty of Applied Health & Community Studies use iPad alongside simulation technology to interpret patient data, practise clinical decision-making and receive real-time feedback before entering hospital placements.
This hands-on experience bridges theory and practice, providing real-time feedback on CPR performance to boost confidence with hospital-grade, life-saving equipment. Instructors also record the training with the Camera app for precise debriefing, ensuring students graduate ready to deliver safe, compassionate, and evidence-informed care.
Faculty of Animation, Arts & Design
Sheridan is known for its world-renowned Faculty of Animation, Arts & Design. In the Honours Bachelor of Craft & Design Program, iMac is used in both the textile and glass studios in the design process of mood boards, presentation boards, and students' capstone process documents.
Textile students use Mac paired with other digital tools to create surface design files for custom, digitally printed fabrics, while the textile studio offers a TC2 digital loom hooked up to technology that includes a Mac for file design and to operate the loom's driver program.
Similarly, students in the glass studio use Mac with other design tools to create surface design elements that are applied to glass works through the sand blasting and decal process.
Experience Campus Life
Creativity and connection go beyond the classroom at Sheridan and extend to student experience across campus. With a goal of making access, connection and safety a simple and seamless experience for students, the college’s student onecard was developed for Apple Wallet to replace physical Student IDs.
Full-time students can add their onecard to their iPhone (or Android device) and Apple Watch and use it to access facilities like classrooms, labs, and more by simply tapping on the sensor. This allows them to pay on campus for food, books, and printing as well as off-campus restaurants where the Sheridan onecard is accepted. The onecard is used across all three Sheridan College campuses.
Designing A Creative Curriculum
Teaching creativity successfully requires intention, practice, and imbuing the process with a sense of fun. For educators, this means challenging the status quo and making academic planning a more collaborative, student-led process.
1. Setting intention: Innovation starts with a goal.
Educators should start every academic planning process with a question: What does success look like, and who can help us achieve it?
At Sheridan, our goal is to create learning environments where curiosity is encouraged. This goal helps us ideate and plan with greater clarity, highlighting natural opportunities for collaboration with industry leaders like Apple to support our creative imperative.
2. Supporting practice: Innovation needs space to grow.
Look at processes or areas where learners often get stuck; what tools can create more room for seamless repetition to learn and grow?
Growth happens through experimentation, iteration and the confidence to try, fail and try again. This is why giving students access to the right tools is an important part of the equation.
3. Creating fun: Dynamic interplay for creative results.
Think about how you can plan for technological experimentation without expectation, allowing students unstructured time to test new systems and approaches.
Technology and creativity are not at odds; one feeds the other. This dynamic interplay is core to the relationship between the two, and it is what creates true and lasting innovation. Giving students the flexibility to test the limits of their ideas fuels this relationship.
As a working musician, I rarely played the same drum kit twice. Every unfamiliar setup forced me to adapt, experiment and learn from other musicians. That's what creativity looks like in education, too: giving students the confidence to unlock new tools, new perspectives and new ways of thinking.
Creativity isn't taught through a single course or a single technology. It's developed through intentional learning environments, meaningful practice and a culture that rewards curiosity. When we design education this way, we prepare graduates not only to succeed in today's world, but to shape what's next.
Learn more about how Sheridan teaches creativity across disciplines: apple.com/education/higher-education/success-stories/sheridan-college-canada/
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