Lead $9.7M Transfer of Training Research Engaging Screenagers
Lead $9.7M Transfer of Training Research Engaging Screenagers
I have just accepted the role of leading a $9.7 million Hong Kong research project focusing on and assessing transfer of training to increase the value of internships for Engaging Screenagers.
Today I began this project looking at interns, and the idea is to monitor and assess how they are using their university learning they are using in their internships and bridge this understanding to jobs after school.
We are using the F-O-C-U-S-E-D framework developed by Dr. Robert Wright at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. (More on that in a later blog.)
Part of my passion for this project is that I haven’t had optimal results I would have liked as an intern and with hiring interns as an employer, so I want to learn some best practices for making internships more productive for everyone.
Also, we want to find some best practices for university educators in their teaching to help make university graduates more valuable when they enter the job market.
Also, we want to find some best practices for university educators in their teaching to help make university graduates more valuable when they enter the job market.
We are basically looking at this issue of transfer of training from university to the working world.
We’re not looking at ways to train students for a job like a tech school (which provide a highly valuable service around the world), so much as we want to find effective ways to support their value in the labor market.
Often we’ve heard over the years that businesses predominantly need to retrain their new hires because the new hires are lacking in the skills necessary to do the job.
In addition, we are looking for some ways to change student and instructor thinking and teaching in ways to support students who are leaving university.
Basically, we are looking at taking what students have learnt in the classroom and investigating how they are using classroom learning in their internships.
Yes, I realise every company or organisation has its own culture, and we want students to be able to apply their learning to their internships right away and be effective.
The project focus on the impact of using some specific decision-making, thinking skills In the workplace.
What this entails is finding a way to track what are they doing and what are they working on and map these back to the classroom in reflective exercises.
Again we use the eWorkbooks as that’s part of what I did my research on reflecting in eWorkbooks to start and if we need more specific ideas, we can build the app.
The challenge will be to map experience reflections back to tangible ideas that students learned in the classroom.
This may entail some AI type algorithms to help us come up with useful ideas, so if we have some hot AI folks out there who have ideas, please let us know.
Using the eWorkbooks can help us capture that those experiences in the reflections and the an ePortfolio of some sort will help us to share and grow the knowledge or the information and understanding.
As with many university courses, I taught courses which focused on academically assessable tasks that are gradable skills and not on learning to work together and solve authentic problems.
Reality check—Isn’t business communication mostly about working together and solving authentic problems? (As opposed to discussions about made-up and out-dated case studies.)
As a professional speaker for Fred Pryor Seminars and Careertrack Seminars in the USA, I had taught a variety communication seminar topics for improved business efficiency.
In seminars the focus was learning usable skills to take back into the workplace improve effectiveness as well as solve problems more efficiently.
In the professional seminar world, we gave participants workbooks so they could follow along and engage with the content in their own way.
As a trainer and university lecturer in the USA, I had great success in my training and classrooms by engaging my learners in ways I had learned from my Dale Carnegie Instructor Training.
In Hong Kong, at first I created paper workbooks for students, but they were not too interested and I couldn’t assess the workbooks’ value or student learning. (junk engagement)
I began to search for alternatives and I struggled testing new apps, etc., until I found eWorkbooks, and after testing began to use them full time in the class.
Then we used eWorkbooks (Google Forms with the training slides as well as interactive questions, curating links and tasks, example images and videos, etc. which trainees (Engaging Screenagers) completed using their mobile devices) for interactive learning.
Students used eWorkbooks to answer questions, interact, share learning reflections, etc. while I lead the discussion, and after they submitted their answers, they would get their responses sent to their inbox so they could review their learning Moments of Growth. (optimal engagement)
Because the students’ responses from eWorkbooks go right into a spreadsheet in real-time, as the teacher I can monitor what students are doing to give them guidance in the moment, as well as track their learning develop over time.
As I was trying to be an academic and publish my findings on eWorkbooks, I included a section on daily reflections of learning (based on university graduate qualities [Program Intended Learning Outcomes, PILOs] where students would submit their reflections in eWorkbooks at the end of class.
At one point I wanted to leave that section out of my journal publication because I had very little time and no expert raters, but my managing editor basically refused to let me publish my paper without those reflections.
The reason my editor wanted the reflections, was because this study was the first of it’s kind to use eWorkbooks to capture reflections on a regular basis, so of course
In the end we finished the qualitative assessment of the reflections and found the eWorkbooks were useful for capturing reflections.
Also, the students reported that reflections seemed to help them relate their learning to situations outside of the classroom, and that made the learning more valuable.
Interestingly, years later, when I see students from those classes, I ask if they are still using reflecting and quite often they tell me they formed a habit of reflecting.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could support Engaging Screenagers to create habits of reflecting learning and experiences in life.
Isn’t it true this is not widely practiced in learning and in life?
Won’t we be restricting our learners to lower performance in life by keeping them from forming this great habit?
Make reflecting on learning a habit to improve learning.
Remember, come join tomorrow to see more Improving Your Engagement with Screenagers and others inspirational experiences and ideas for Optimal Engagement in the ScreenAge.
Remember to engage tomorrow.
Following with you.
Keep it simple.
All the Best, Warren
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