Blended Learning – Bridging Academia and Industry through Project-Based Learning

• Hear about the benefits and challenges of Higher Ed - Industry partnerships, and see how blended learning can support the relationship.

• Find out how blended learning can aid in faculty collaborations, and meet the demands of content-rich courses.

• See a case example of how project-based learning can lend itself to the blended model, merging professional development and higher ed curricula.

The purpose of this presentation is to unpack the strategies we’ve used to create a successful collaboration between students and professionals that have fostered a lasting partnership between higher ed and industry organizations. In this presentation we plan to propose a course framework that can be used across disciplines to develop successful collaborations.

The course model combines:

1. An intensive project-based learning experience

2. Student and professional collaborations

3. Flipped classroom to meet course and learner needs

The framework we’ve used to develop a Systems Approach to Food Access represents a timely and innovative approach to blended learning, combining higher-ed and professional development curricula. It leverages the experience of professionals in the field and rising academics to solve relevant problems in the field of Public Health. The design of this course has been the collaborative efforts of NYU’s College of Public Health and the United Nation’s World Food Programme (WFP). Together, academic leaders and experts at WFP have built a curriculum to meet the needs of NYU students and WFP professionals, and opened a space where career-readiness and career-advancement are central to course development.

Industry – Academia Partnerships

The Systems Approach course initiative led to a partnership between NYU College of Public Health and the United Nations World Food Programme. This organizational collaboration was well-matched, as the professional development needs at WFP and the need for practical experience for NYU students were complimentary. The course initiative has brought about many organizational-level benefits, as well as challenges along the way. We’ll discuss the partnership relationship in this section of the presentation, detailing how obstacles were overcome, and how these practices can be applied to industry-higher ed collaborations across disciplines.

While the problem space within the course is specific to Public Health and Food Studies, this model can be applied to many domains. The main goal of this session is to highlight aspects of our course framework as a case study, to inform the audience of how and why this approach can be applied across fields.

Course Design and Iteration

The goal of the course was twofold: Provide the MPH students at CGPH the ability to work side by side as equals with professionals working in the field of Public Health and give WFP professionals the opportunity to complete training in an educational environment providing new tools to use when they returned to their posts in the field.

One of the main tasks of the course was to develop interventions that WFP could rapidly use in the field. The mix of students and field professionals created an environment where acquired theory could be rapidly integrated with practical application during an intensive 8 day classroom experience.

The course has undergone many changes over 5 iterations, beginning with a 2 week face-to-face intensive workshop, and ending with our latest hybrid model.

Course Development

This course was first offered in the 2015 summer term. In the 2 week intensive course, three NYU faculty members, Chris Dickey, Bernadette Boden-Albala and Joyce O'Connor worked together to develop a syllabus and scheduled multiple speakers and activities within various Public Health disciplines, including environmental science, anthropology, epidemiology, nutrition, policy and management, among others. Students were then divided into groups, with each member assigned an avatar role, specializing in one of the core domains of Public Health. Each team was tasked with solving a problem related to food access in a specific region. This meant that teams were required to take into account the particular environment, political climate, and culture of the region when developing their solutions. This team project resulted in a 10 page paper by the group as well as a final presentation. The projects involved the development of an implementable, systems-focused, and community based program to improve the food security and nutrition situation in a specific geographical region. Completed and edited materials could be available to WFP, UNICEF and other international organizations for inspiration and/or application.

A similar version of the course was offered again in the Fall of 2015. The first two courses brought to light many issues around running the course as a two-week intensive workshop. To summarize, the main challenges were time-based issues – it was difficult for full-time students and working professionals to interrupt their everyday schedules for a two-week intensive face to face course. It wasn’t feasible to manage the scheduling for so many speakers, over such a long span of time. There were also challenges around the pedagogical design. With this model students found the final project work difficult to complete while they were at the same time still accruing foundational knowledge.

Modifications

We took this information into consideration as we continued to run the course, and made modifications for each of the 5 iterations. Throughout the ongoing rollouts, we developed a blended format consisting of a 3 week online section to build foundational knowledge, with a shorter 1 week face-to-face workshop. We’ve categorized the types of changes that occurred throughout these iterations as follows;

1.Time-Based: These are changes that have been made due to time restrictions for students, faculty, and the organizations. They are largely related to scheduling, for both guest lecturers and online course monitoring, as well as the length of time students have to access content, among other changes.

2.Content-Based: These are changes we made to the course content in terms of format. Between the first and third iteration of the course, many changes were made, as we switched from an entirely in-person course to the hybrid model.

3.Pedagogy-Based: These are changes we made to the content in terms to accommodate or enhance a learning outcome.

In this section, we’ll describe the most valuable lessons we’ve learned about switching from face to face to hybrid, focusing on our content creation strategies and how blended learning has enabled us to foster a sustainable partnership.

Course Goals – Fulfilling Academic and Professional Needs

Our Systems Approach course model utilizes key pedagogical strategies of 21st Century education. The current course framework uses a flipped classroom to build foundational knowledge of the multidisciplinary topics that form the base of the course. These understandings are applied in context through project-based learning, where student groups and mentors utilize distributed learning to build a collaborative learning environment.

In this section we’ll discuss how we’ve leveraged the course framework to support a multidisciplinary perspective for problem solving, to reimagine the hierarchical relationships between professionals and students, and encourage situated learning in a practical context.

We will closely examine how these pedagogical theories address the challenge of meeting both university student and professional needs within the course.

Results

Finally, we’ll relay the feedback we’ve received from students, faculty, and the World Food Program regarding the course model, and identify how blended learning helped us to reach the OLC 5 pillars. Hear about our planned next steps within the course framework and brainstorm concepts for interdisciplinary applications.