Performing Department
(N/A)
Non Technical Summary
As the United States population grows older with fewer young people in the labor force and fewer still who are educated in food, agricultural, community, and environmental disciplines with the knowlege and skills required to be career ready members of the labor force that predicts significantly fewer graduates capable of solving the grand challenges in food, agricultural and environmental systems. This project aims to enhance the career readiness of graduates in the College of ACES at the University of Illinois by utilizing a human centered design approach aimed at developing, implementing, and evaluating a number of action learning courses in the college constructed with the intention of developing students for career ready skills. Action learning is an exeperientail learning approach that partners students with extertal clients from both corporate and community based organizations whereby they are placed in interdisciplinary groups to solve authentic problems and develop authentic products for said external client. This project posits that the knowledge, skills, and behaviors students learn in action learning coursework increase not only their technical skills in the discipline and related workplace but also make them more career ready future employees able to work in teams, communicate with external partners in professional settings, collect data, problem solve, analyze and present results, and ultimately create authentic products used in future workplaces. To accomplish the overall aim of this project which is to create enough courses across the college using action learning to develop the career ready skills of approximately 1200 students, project directors will offer yearly professional development seminars to scale action learning in the college, create a digital repository of teaching tools faculty can utilize to implement action learning, train a set of faculty mentors who are exemplars in action learning to train and mentor other faculty, and offer mini-grants and other technical support to help faculty teach using action learning approaches. Furthermore the project with create a pipeline of external corporate and community orgniaztion partners who are served by the action learning courses developed and thus hiring students directly into future positions.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
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Applied
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Developmental
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Goals / Objectives
The aim of this project is to use a human-centered design (HCD) approach to design and implement a college-wide faculty development program to teach action learning courses in each major across the College of ACES. Using an HCD approach to design and implement a college-wide faculty development program to teach action learning courses entails implementing a series of processes to accomplish this major goal: (a) empathize/collaborate with key stakeholders, (b) synthesize research-supported design opportunities for faculty development programs to teach action learning courses, (c) brainstorm ideas to define the different components of a viable program (e.g. goals, scope, content, etc.) and plan for prototyping (d) prototype and evaluate the program, and (e) implement the program at the college level. Once the action learning program is implemented, this project will accomplish the following objectives: (1) offer yearly faculty development workshops for creating an action learning course (2) develop a web-based repository of examples, forms, and other digital assets and examples for faculty to easily create action learning curriculum, (3) empower a cohort of 15 faculty across the college ot serve as mentors for other faculty who want to create action learning courses, (4) engage a pipeline of approximately 150 external clients, both from companies and community-based organizations to serve as the external partners for action learning courses, (5) increase the career-ready skills of approximately 1200 students who will have been enrolled in at least one action learning course by the duration of the project.
Project Methods
The project will analyze stakeholder data already collected to design a prototype for faculty development for action learning. Then, a faculty action learning symposium will be created for each of the 3 remaining years of the project to train faculty participants for designing action learning curriculum. Faculty members knowledge and skills for using action learning will be assessed upon completion of the faculty development workshops. Simultaneously, a set of digital assets will be developed for faculty to use when creating their own action learning courses. A cohort of 5 faculty mentors will be selected each year and trained as exemplars to help develop other faculty colleagues to create action learning courses, and to offer their own examples up as cases for future action learning course design. Each year, the knowledge, skills and behaviors of students enrolled in the action learning courses will be assessed before and after enrolling in the action learning courses to determine student change in career ready skills as a result of the action learning process. Each year simultaneously, the external employee partners from corporations and community based organizations who will be working with the students will be assessed on their perceptions of student career readiness as a result of the action learning course as well.