Dr. Patricia Orozco is a Master Lecturer and functions as a cooperative education coordinator at Laurentian University in the Faculty of Management in Sudbury Ontario, where she has been since 2008. She is responsible for the work integrated learning (WIL) experiences of her students who are largely placed in small to medium sized business. Their WIL program features a deep partnership with the local business to insure success of the placement where students often do many jobs in the company. It also features an on-line companion course for students that provides WIL skill-building opportunities, reflection, teamwork, etc. It was very useful in keeping students on track when the university suddenly went to online operation in the face of the Covid19 pandemic in the early spring of 2020.

Ian Sladen is the Vice President of Cooperative Education and Career Development at Drexel University, a cooperative education school that has practiced that form of education for over 100 years. Previously, he was the Associate Dean for Drexel’s Charles Close School of Entrepreneurship and helped develop their entrepreneurship and Innovation degree programs. He brings this faculty and academic knowledge to the job or Co-op Vice President. As Nations turn toward more skill development from Higher Education institutions, we thought it would be interesting to talk with Ian about how their program works and what are its benefits to student maturity of this form of experiential education that enable them to succeed post-graduation. We also wanted to ask him how Drexel was coping with the rush to virtualization forced by the Covid19 pandemic and what are the implications for the future.

Dr. Michael Sharp is an Associate Professor of Experiential Learning at the University of Cincinnati but we picked him here as he is also the editor of Experience Magazine hosted by the Cooperative Education and Internship Association. He is also the co-founder of the Tapioca Radio Show. We thought it was an interesting idea to turn-the-tables on him and make him the subject of an interview rather than be the organizer of other’s voices. That turned out to be a great idea on a number of levels as you will hear about in the podcast. Note specifically, that Sharp works at Cincinnati in Service Learning, making the point himself of the interconnectedness of experiential learning in its many forms. When you listen to the podcast, particularly the introduction, many references are made to the links listed provided below. You will also hear near the end of the podcast the most excellent experiential-education reason behind the name “Tapioca” for the radio show, but we will not spoil that story for you.

Given that we three, like everyone else, are working under stay-at-home directives to address the COVID-19 pandemic, we thought it was a good moment to reflect on our experiences doing this podcast and working in this experiential area in general. We figured our conversation would take 10 minutes. What happened was a lively conversation of more than twice that length. And it happens in the middle of a vital season with two good podcasts already produced this winter/spring and more to come. So, have a listen and get into the heads of the pod-casters on this critical topic of how experiential education enhances what students learn in college.

Shaun McAlmont is President of Career Learning at K12 Inc., an online and blended educational course provider to high school students, schools, and companies with over 120,000 students. He has a background of an EdD degree from the University of Pennsylvania and brings to K12 a long career experience in for-profit higher education at Newmont College and the Lincoln Tech system of colleges. Shaun’s job at K12 is to lead on career learning solutions and that is what brings him to this podcast. More and more private companies are moving into the experiential education space, whether in secondary schools or higher education with the goals of bringing skill-building work-related activities into the classroom and thereby increasing student career awareness, educational engagement, and success. We explore that space here.

Cara Krezek is the President of the Canadian Association of Cooperative Education and Work Integrated Learning, otherwise known as CEWIL. We talk about how this organization of education institutions has worked recently to expand its definition of and to promote experiential education more broadly for Canadian students. Importantly, the national governments, both conservative and liberal, recently passed legislation and committed funding of about one billion dollars to provide an experiential activity for every Canadian student. CEWIL is in the thick of it focusing on quality assurance through, in part, an accreditation operation. We also talked about Cara’s home institution of Brock University in southern Ontario where she directs the co-op career and experiential program and how Brock became the first institution in Canada to adopt university-wide some 20 definitions experiential education broadly.

Co-hosts Jim Stellar, Mary Churchill, and Adrienne Dooley preview season two of ExperiencED, the experiential education podcast. The lineup includes: Cara Krezek, The Director of Cooperative Education at Brock University in Canada, and the President of the national Canadian organization Co-op Education & Work Integrated Learning or CEWIL, Jillian Kinzie Associate Director of the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) Institute, Shaun McAlmont, the President of Career Readiness at K12 Inc, and Michael Sharp the editor of Experience Magazine at CEIA the Cooperative Education and Internship Association.

If you have any suggestions for topics, interviewees, or other ideas, please write to us at [email protected]

Frank Cicio is the founder of iQ4 a for-profit company that currently provides structured cybersecurity courses to colleges and universities that feature 1) an industry virtual mentor provided by the company from a large pool of corporate volunteers and 2) an e-portfolio of skills tied to the industry/national standards that is called a passport. These courses can be real-world or entirely virtual and can be semester-long or 4-week where they operate either as non-credit stand alone or as part of an existing credit-bearing course like a laboratory. The company’s track record with students is that this experience is powerful, galvanizing, and leads to employment after graduation (or real-world internships for current students). It also plugs a skills-gap in a key enterprise where recruiting for jobs is a corporate problem. This podcast reviews the founding, ongoing implementation, and future plans for other areas (e.g. data science).

In this episode, Nancy Johnston, the new President of WACE (World Association of Cooperative Education) talks with us about her personal development, the WACE organization, and recent accomplishments of WACE. In the second half of the interview, we talk with her about the value of experiential education as an important complement to a course-based classical academic education. She makes a important points about the value of cooperative education (co-op) and other forms of experiential education beyond the critical value for employment including the importance of study abroad experiences in an increasingly borderless world.

In this episode, professor Paul Harrington, a labor market economist from Drexel University shares with Mary Churchill the challenges of mal-employment where a college education does not convert to a job after graduation in the field of study. Not only is this a prevalent condition but it leads to serious negative economic consequences for starting salary and future individual economic development. Paul and Mary discuss the contributing factors and various ways that higher education can address key academic skill learning and experiential activities in the workplace can reduce mal-employment.