Abstract
Athabasca University's Faculty of Business (AU-FB) has introduced a new virtual co-operative program to provide targeted work experience. The virtual co-op responds in part to the charge that new university graduates lack work-readiness and the needed professional soft skills to succeed in workplaces, as well as the reduction in onsite work placements as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The virtual co-op uses artificial intelligence in the form of natural language understanding, allowing students to engage with AI characters as they solve problems using disciplinary knowledge and practicing professional skills. They are provided with just-in-time coaching support when they fail and progress reports on how well they respond to challenges when interacting with others to solve workplace problems and complete projects. Work settings offered to students are either a financial service or a digital business transformation consulting organization setting.
TopWhy A Virtual Co-Op?
The academic literature provides significant evidence that business graduates often lack key skills such as communication, leadership, problem-solving, inter alia, collectively referred to as soft skills, demanded by industry (Chaffer & Webb, 2017; Murti, 2014). Since business schools are the feeders of graduates into industry, it is expected (reasonably or not) that business schools bear the responsibility of ensuring their graduates develop the requisite soft skills. However, despite the academic research findings, university education—especially in the popular majors of accounting, finance, and management science—continues to focus on what employers demand and value the most: technical skills (Morpurgo & Azevedo, 2021). Combining this technical emphasis with other limitations and constraints on university curricula, courses, and time, faculty members often lack the freedom, opportunity, and even the skills required to effectively teach soft skills development.
Fortunately, the Virtual Co-op experience is uniquely positioned to overcome a number of these limitations. In the Virtual Co-op experience, students have the opportunity to develop these important skills while relieving faculty members of some of the teaching burden. Also, it facilitates a consistent and effective assessment of students’ soft skills development not over one or two assessments, but rather over an entire academic term in the context of an ongoing simulation that adapts and responds to the learner.
Even if some undergraduate business students are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to participate in co-op programs or internships within organizations and learn or develop soft skills, this learning may not be ideal or complete. Such placements are generally not structured or designed to teach their interns those skills formally. The Virtual Co-op, on the other hand, is specifically designed to help the learner develop and reinforce a set of soft skills deliberately. This is done through a series of directed activities and projects with regular interventions, feedback, and guidance in a way that thoroughly engages the learner.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Simulation Learning: Placing students in a narrative scenario or situation representing a scenario or situation in the real world. The narrative situation adds context to experiential learning.
Skill Development: The recognition, practice, and internalization of skills towards improved execution of skills.
Experiential Learning: Learning through hands-on, practical, and reflective activities.
Natural Language Understanding: A field of computer science that focuses on developing a computer’s ability to understand the structure and meaning of human language.
Work Readiness Skills: The combination of general cognitive skills such as numeracy and critical thinking with soft skills such as emotional intelligence that are needed in an organizational setting.
Co-Operative (Co-Op) Education: The combining of traditional teaching methods with in-person, practical work experience.
Virtual Learning: The creation of a learning space close to representing an actual setting as possible.