Strategies

As a silver lining to this cloud of challenges, educators are coming up with innovative ideas to meet the learning goals. This module attempts to present a compilation of a few such initiatives.

The strategies that can work best for students who are learning to adapt to the online workspace (Green and Payne, 2014; Bowen, 2020) include the ability to be accessible to other team members and having a physical space at home dedicated for work. A few basic things that instructors can ensure are:

1. Help the students be resourceful and self-directed under these situations to make things less stressful for them. Students can be encouraged to set and prioritize their task goals, collect and ask questions about the task, and gather information related to the task. Providing such opportunities for students to become more self-directed in their work, communication and attitude can start right from the classroom prior to their WIL experience. This may enable instructors to re-evaluate their curriculum to help students become work ready.
2. Encourage students to stay organized by keeping an online journal or notebook to record their progress and note questions that arise. Guide them in replicating a professional environment by following a routine and exhibiting professional behaviour during interactions.

Besides following the above, there are other methods that can be applied to successfully engage the students despite the challenges posed by the pandemic today. Here’s some strategies that have been recommended by researchers and practitioners:

• Think of the campus as a potential partner and assign projects that can benefit the campus. For example, the University of Toronto has assigned students a task of finding a way to prevent condensation from forming in the walls of the rare book library.
• Explore and seek ways to leverage a wealth of resources available from UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Goals – Resources for educators.
• Planning high-level collaborations like sharing one partner project across many courses and encouraging students to connect and network with peers at other institutions to address a common global problem. These activities help in broadening students’ perspectives while giving them a diverse experience.
• Identifying small businesses that need help in their operations. E.g. Fifty students from York University helped 3300 businesses in building their websites, under the City of Toronto’s ShopHERE program.
• Using experiential learning platforms like Riipen to identify projects and industry partners.
• Simulations (Quinn et al., 2019; Wood et al., 2020) and Gaming (Smith, 2020): Instructors can choose resources (or collaborate such resources with industry partners) to create interactive virtual work-integrated learning environments consisting of embedded images (preferably 360-degree images), explanatory videos, shared documents and virtual tours. Simulating the work environment can create real-world experiences within an educational framework. Getting more insight into simulated WIL and remote WIL can be explored in this resource.  (Tables in particular on 6-12 & 15)

Simulated activities and virtual trips can be found at PHET Simulations, University of Toronto Open Modules Projects, Morpho Source, OER Commons, Jove, Labster and Concord Consortium, LEARNZ and Oxford University Press and other sites.

Here are a few more tactics for linking WIL to the classroom and beyond:

• Alumni connect: Giving opportunities to students to learn and collaborate with their alumni allows continuous learning and networking. These opportunities can be in the form of presentations, discussion forums, blogs or hubs. An innovative way to achieve this is “Wisdom Walls” (Packansky-Brock, 2017). This involves inviting your current students to share a piece of advice about the course with future students or it can be used to share workplace advice or to connect Alumni.
• Mentoring and feedback by industry: Mentoring by industry experts and receiving feedback from them is considered to be highly motivated by the students. (Janchai et al., 2019; Snell-Siddle et al., 2019), Besides individual mentoring, this can be achieved by guest speakers from industry or students sharing their success stories, challenges and career insights. Humber College champions students’ WIL feedback which may help create new mentors over time.
• Encourage critical reflection: Students’ reflections on their work can be used to develop a better understanding of the impact of their work experience on crucial aspects of their learning like personal growth, relationship building, knowledge transfer, self-directedness etc. Two such models which can prove to be highly effective in critical reflective journaling are:
  • DEAL (Describe, Examine and Articulate learning) by Ash & Clayton (2009): The model comprises three steps (a) Description which includes a comprehensive detailed account of the work experience, (b) Examine the learning opportunities with respect to previously identified learning goals and (c) Articulation of learning that involves recognizing the learning experience and create goals for future action. Here’s an insight into the DEAL Model with an example to help explain the model.
  • Reflection map: A Reflection Map (Eyler, 2110; 2002) is another method to ensure to engage students in WIL through a progressive reflection across their experience. The map lays out reflections according to timing – pre, during and post-experience and thus enables students to assume ownership over the reflection plan and its connection to learning goals. As a small example, pre-work reflection can include a goal statement, during-the-work can include discussion with peers and post-experience can include a summary of work.
• Prepare students with more insight: Presenting pre-recorded presentations about the industry and a virtual field trip assists students in preparing themselves better for their WIL projects (Snell and Snell-Siddle, 2017). Further, offering supplementary training about their workplace rights and safety, professional etiquette and what is expected of them can further help them adapt faster. Also encourage students to take ownership by reaching out to colleagues, experts, friends, and associates.  Self-direction at this point can help maintain focus on the world beyond the classroom(Darby, 2019).