AU$1M Experiential Learning Innovation Grants Program to help >100,000 young people build employability skills

Round 4 Expression of Interest Due Thu Oct 21. Click here for UK applications and here for AU applications Australian edtech startup Practera has distributed more than AU$785,000  in in-kind grants to 21 Australian Universities to accelerate online experiential learning programs through Covid. Across 3 rounds, Practera has already deployed  ~30 in-kind grants to Universities with the potential to benefit more than 100,000 learners through its platform technology. The program aims to help University educators continue to innovate valuable experiential learning programs in the face of post-pandemic resource constraints and challenges. Practera will commit AU$1M in support through this program, With the recent launch of our UK office, round 4 will now be open to both Australian and UK educators. Applications for round 4 are open until 21st October 2021.  Click here for UK applications and here for AU applications   Angie Knaggs, Senior Educational Designer in the UQ Faculty of Business, Economics and Law received a round 1 grant to work with Practera to develop a Faculty Capstone program – Learning by Doing in a Disruptive World. She said “We had already determined that Practera was the right platform for this flagship program, which is a highly applied, interdisciplinary and team-based unit with strong industry engagement, feedback loops and project-based collaboration. It was obviously however a challenging time to request funds for new technology, so from our perspective, the grant came at just the right time to enable us to move forward. The design & configuration project is underway and the Practera team are great to work with – we appreciate their investment in our program!” If you want to learn more about our products, please get in touch. We are looking forward to having a chat! Contact Beau Leese Co-Founder & co-CEO, Practera beau@practera.com Mob. +61433 262 855

What Are Employability Skills?

The term ‘employability skills’ describes a group of core transferable skills and personal characteristics employers look for in potential job candidates. Applicants with these skills are attractive to future employers because they are more likely to perform effectively and become valuable team members.

If you are teaching university students, you can help them develop important skills that will foster their ability to work with teammates, solve workplace problems, meet project timelines, and stay up to date with industry changes. Employability skills are sometimes also known as soft skills, foundational skills, basic skills, or job-readiness skills. 

Are Employability Skills Different to Job Skills Specific for a Role?

Yes. Unlike the professional or technical job specific skills required for particular careers, employability skills are generic and necessary for almost every job. For example, communication and teamwork skills are vital in every industry, whether it’s in construction, healthcare, engineering, information technology, or the arts.

10 Job Skills Students Need to Develop

For university students, there’s more to tertiary education than gaining good marks and an academic qualification. While teaching classes, you can also be facilitating the development of key employability skills that will boost your students’ chances of finding a great job. Here are 10 examples of employability skills you can foster in your students.

Communication

Good communication skills are vital in every job. Communication involves the ability to express yourself clearly and effectively, both verbally and in writing, and strong listening skills. Communication skills also encompass the ability to use and interpret non-verbal language, such as gestures.

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You can support the development of communication skills in your students by encouraging them to:

• blog and/or use social media to express their thoughts and ideas
• give oral presentations as part of their studies
• join a community group or club, or do paid work

• practise active and empathetic listening 
• join a public speaking, peer support or networking group.

Teamwork

Teamwork is essential for workplaces to operate efficiently. It involves the ability to work cooperatively to pursue shared goals. You could help students achieve better teamwork skills by recommending they:

• participate in group assignments and projects throughout their course
• join a sports team, study skills group or community organisation
• establish relationships with people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds 
• recognise their own strengths and limitations and those of their team mates
• coach or mentor others.

Problem solving

In an increasingly complex world, students need the skills to understand, work through and solve problems. Challenges and setbacks are a normal part of working life, so they need processes for dealing with them. 

You can establish problem solving skills in your students by suggesting they:

• look for things that need fixing at home and research how to do it
• participate in project-based learning, which requires finding solutions to real-world work challenges
• volunteer at a group that seeks to solve community, environmental or social issues
• look for problem solving and decision making opportunities in their current workplaces

• seek opportunities to creatively solve their challenges, such as balancing study with work, family and social activities.

Initiative

Initiative is a valuable workplace skill because it involves seeking out work that needs to be done, rather than waiting to be told what to do. It also covers looking for better ways to do current work tasks.  

Some ways to increase your students’ initiative skills include advising them to:

• take the lead on group projects or assignments
• practice writing a cover letter and job applications
• approach potential employers about internships or work placements
• look for ways to increase efficiencies or take on new responsibilities in their current workplaces
• organise a family or community event.

Planning and organising

This requires considering what needs to be done, how, when, where, and by whom. These skills are vital for completing work to a satisfactory standard and meeting deadlines. You can support development of your students’ planning and organisational skills by recommending they:

• establish and stick to a study schedule
• plan research assignments to ensure they can meet deadlines
• organise a group project, family or community event
• arrange a travel/holiday itinerary.

Self-management

Self-management is the ability to control your time and physical and mental energy to accomplish what you need to. It’s important in the workplace, where employers want staff to be able to do their jobs and meet deadlines without needing too much supervision.

Examples of ways to boost your student’s self-management skills include encouraging them to:

• complete an internship or project-based work placement 
• establish a plan to manage their project timelines and different responsibilities
• participate in a community or volunteer organisation
• keep their room and study space tidy and organised
• take responsibility for their actions and the consequences.

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Learning

In a rapidly changing globalised world, the ability to learn new information and practical skills is vital. A lifelong love of learning will support students throughout their careers. Some ways to improve your students’ learning skills include recommending they:

• participate in an experiential learning program or study skills course
• take up a new sport or new hobby, such as learning to play a musical instrument
• research how to perform new skills, such as changing a tyre or baking a souffle
• take advantage of different learning opportunities, such as peer mentoring or study groups
• remain open to new information, new ideas and different practices.

Technology

Technology skills probably sound like a given these days, but employers rate them highly. In addition to being able to compose a social post or email, valuable skills include the ability to use software programs and hardware such as an EFTPOS machine or video camera.

Your students could improve their technology skills by:

• completing an online course in a technology they’re not familiar with
• undertaking a work placement or internship that involves learning to use field-specific tech applications
• researching innovative solutions that involved designing creative technology
• asking their workplace or community group to train them to use their technologies
• researching what technology is used in their field and what training is involved.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence (also sometimes known as emotional quotient or EQ) involves the ability to identify, understand and use emotions in healthy ways, in order to remain calm under pressure, communicate effectively, and develop good relationships. 

Ways to help students develop better emotional intelligence skills include encouraging them to:

• notice their feelings in different circumstances and how they influence actions
• practise emotional control strategies, such as deep breathing 
• build relationships with others who think differently to them
• look for non-verbal cues in others, such as body language and voice tone.

Conflict resolution

In a workplace where people have a range of different backgrounds, ideas and ways of working, some form of conflict is inevitable. Employers value team members who can resolve disagreements in a positive way – whether their own or between other people.

Your students could develop conflict resolution skills by:

• accepting conflict is part of life and being prepared to manage it
• actively listening to the other person and trying to understand their viewpoint
• separating the person from the problem they’re dealing with
• maintaining a professional attitude.

Supporting University Students to Develop Employability Skills

As evident, there are numerous ways educators can cultivate employability skills in their students. This typically does not involve more hours of academic learning. Rather, employability skills are developed through tasks that put academic knowledge into practice. For example, students can build employability skills by participating in authentic work projects at a business, government, or community organisation. 

Developing Employability Skills with Experiential Learning 

Increasingly, students need to complete university as work-ready graduates. Educators must therefore equip students with not only job specific technical or professional knowledge, but the employability skills they need to get and maintain work.

Experiential learning projects facilitate this outcome and have many benefits for everyone involved. For universities and other educational institutions, the ability to offer high-quality experiential learning projects is a powerful point of difference that can help you attract and retain students and establish mutually beneficial partnerships with industry, government and community partners.

For your students, evidence supports utilising experiential learning (also known as work-integrated learning) to bolster employability skills. 

How Practera Can Help Your University Foster Employability Skills in Students

Practera works with educational institutions to provide high-quality experiential learning programs, at scale and with reduced delivery costs.

Our fully supported and quality assured programs and project-based learning managed services easily connect university students with genuine workplace experiences across a range of categories, such as internships (including virtual internships), team projects, work simulations and more. These are gathered from thousands of employers globally, including corporations, community organisations and government departments.

Crucially, Practera can deliver all our experiential learning programs virtually. Our pioneering and user-friendly platform has been developed to maximise learning quality and the student experience for both onsite and online delivery.

For educators, Practera’s research-backed feedback, assessment and performance tracking devices support top-quality remote program delivery, facilitating continued provision of experiential learning irrespective of COVID-19 restrictions. 

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Enrol for free in Practera’s government-backed live programs to build your employability skills  

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Inbuilt tools to support a seamless experience and enhanced learning outcomes include:

Provision of timely, quality feedback

As one of Practera’s top strengths, our platform facilitates provision of individualised feedback from industry and educators. This is delivered consistently and at key times to drive reflection, deep learning, and enhanced student performance. Our Team360 assessments also enable educators to embed a peer feedback loop into learning activities.

Intrinsic assessment tools

Practera offers multiple options for assessing and progressing student learning. You can easily set
up various assessment types, including those which allow for a feedback loop and straightforward question-and-answer options. Grading student work is simplified with our user-friendly rubrics. 

Innovative technology

Practera’s real-time analytics and data dashboards enable you to rapidly identify any issues before they escalate, conduct detailed performance analyses, and capture end of program reports. Our world-first AI-assistant, known as ELSA, provides 24/7 monitoring to provide real-time recommendations based on research-backed learning science, saving you time and helping you deliver optimum learning outcomes.

Students who have participated in Practera’s programs frequently report the experience they gained was invaluable, helping them develop the necessary skills to secure employment. 

Practera is one of 8 teams from 4 countries who have advanced to the semifinalist round of the $5M XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling Competition, a three-year competition reimagining the future of work and transforming how we train and educate workers.

As a semifinalist, Practera will now enter the large-scale field testing stage of the competition, in which each team will need to demonstrate their proposed solutions, will rapidly place trained workers in 60 days or less, and then support the workers to ensure job retention of at least 60 days. 

At Practera, we are inspired by XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling’s vision of a future where all workers have access to gainful and meaningful employment. A concept that so closely aligns with our mission, values and work to date.

Huge congratulations to our U.S. team, Prue Clifford, Wes Sonnenreich, Maxwell Chappuis and to all the other semifinalist teams on their achievement of making it to the next round. We’re proud to be working alongside some fantastic innovators as part of the XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling competition, reimagining the future of work and transforming how we train and educate workers. 

We’re super excited and are looking forward to the semifinal competition!

Find out more about our experiential learning technology platform and programs here.

 

22 July 2021 — LSE Careers has partnered with experiential learning provider Practera to deliver digital industry project learning programmes for their students on the Practera platform. Teams of students are working on virtual consultancy projects for real industry clients ranging from charities and sustainability initiatives to creative industries and marketing. 

Director, LSE Careers, Lizzie Darlington said, “Work-based learning is a key area of our strategy at LSE Careers; it’s vital that students have real-world opportunities to develop meaningful professional skills during their time at LSE and beyond. These 3-week industry projects will give students a huge step forward in their careers as they engage with their industry clients and mentors on real business challenges, and enable students to experience a broader diversity of career options during their course of study. It’s fantastic to team up with Practera who have a global industry network and such high professional standards in delivering engaging work-based learning at scale.”

Jane Hallett, Practera’s UK lead, said, “We’re proud to be partnering with a globally recognised institution like LSE, and delighted to be supporting their vision to enhance work-based learning opportunities for students, graduates, staff and employers. We look forward to seeing the results and skill growth for students in the Virtual Summer Consultancy Projects and beyond.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

 

 

Project-based learning (PBL) enables students to learn deeply and develop core employability skills through participating in real work projects and experiences. It has benefits for students, education institutions and industry. With Practera’s support, organising project-based learning is cost-effective and simple.

What is project-based learning?

Project-based learning (PBL) is a teaching method that drives student learning by engaging them in real-world, meaningful projects. It’s a style of inquiry-based and student-centred learning. In PBL, students work in groups over a set period on a project designed to solve a genuine problem or answer a challenging question. Students demonstrate their knowledge and skills by creating a product or presentation for a public audience.

Project based learning activities allow students to develop deep content knowledge. Importantly, PBL also supports development of 21 st century skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, creativity and communication. PBL education is used across various learning environments, including high schools and universities.

It’s important to distinguish a PBL project from a traditional school or college project. Educators sometimes use light projects to supplement other learning activities. This can be likened to icing on a cake. In contrast, PBL is like the cake itself – it forms the substance of unit learning and skill development.

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Why use project based learning?

The simple answer is that contemporary work is often project-based work. Forces including globalisation, automation and growth of the gig economy mean predictable and repetitive jobs are increasingly uncommon.

Instead, many current students’ careers will involve working on a series of projects. It therefore makes sense for them to have experience with project-based work, along with the knowledge and skills required to be a successful project team member.

What are the benefits of project based learning?

Project based learning also has other advantages for students. These include:

• Deeper engagement and interaction with learning content
• Encouragement of higher order thinking and problem-solving skills
• Development of peer and professional networks
• Engagement with potential employers and career mentors
• Fostering of 21 st century skills like collaboration and communication
• Enhanced autonomy and agency in learning
• A sense of mastery and self-efficacy
• Gaining valuable career insights.

Benefits for universities and industry

Universities and other educational institutions can also benefit from offering project-based learning that connects students with real-world projects and clients. The capacity to offer students high- quality PBL projects creates a differentiation point that can help you attract and retain students, improve their employability and satisfaction, and foster important partnerships with community, government and industry partners.

For educators, the PBL model can expand their repertoire of pedagogical strategies and lead to greater job satisfaction.

For industry, a PBL approach gives you access to teams of talented students eager to learn and apply their up-to-date academic knowledge. It creates opportunities to upskill staff in coaching and mentoring, and to meet potential job candidates.

Establishing a program

If implementing a PBL program sounds like a great idea, it’s important to understand how to do it well before you get started. Research by the Buck Institute for Education has shown that a successful PBL unit must include some essential design elements for deeper learning, higher engagement and better-quality work to occur.
They are:

• A challenging problem or question – the project must involve a meaningful, real-world problem that needs solving or question that needs answering, at an appropriately challenging level.
• Sustained inquiry – PBL projects need to give students the chance to engage in an extended, thorough process of questioning, finding resources, and applying information.
• Realism – the project must involve a real-life situation or task, or be related to the students’ personal concerns, life issues and interests.
• Student voice and choice – students need to be included in making decisions about the project, such as what they will create and how, and be allowed to communicate their ideas in their own voices.
• A public product for a real audience – the project needs to result in a piece of work that is shared with or presented to an audience beyond the classroom, such as industry clients or the public.
• Reflection – educators and students reflect on their learning, the quality of work produced, any challenges that arose, and the success of strategies used to overcome them.
• Feedback and revision – through reflection and critique, students should give, receive, and apply feedback (including formative and summative assessment) to enhance their processes and products.

When effectively designed, implemented and scaffolded, PBL can have a huge impact on the quality and success of your teaching practices.

How Practera can help

This might all sound quite complex, and it is if you’re trying to set everything up yourself. But with Practera’s help and resources, implementing project-based learning is simple.

Our dedicated team can help with our project-based learning managed services which help find you the most suitable program for your students and connect them with industry leaders. By connecting with our team, we offer continuous support in our programs with a dedicated program manager to ensure your students get the most out of their learning experience.

Our fully supported and quality assured programs are designed to easily connect university students with genuine industry experiences, internships and projects.

These are curated from thousands of global employers, including government departments, corporates and community organisations. Our expansive library of cost-effective project types facilitates projects ranging from two-week micro-internships to custom PBL programs to suit your requirements—all digitally enabled and scalable to thousands of learners.

Importantly, Practera can deliver these PBL programs virtually. Our innovative and user-friendly platform is designed to optimise learning quality and the student experience, regardless of whether programs are used onsite or remotely.

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Monitoring progress and outcomes

Feedback about progress and outcomes is crucial for successful PBL, and you’ll want to ensure your PBL programs are achieving the desired results. Practera has you covered with our range of feedback, assessment and performance tracking tools.

Quality feedback to enhance learning outcomes

Quality feedback is one of Practera’s core strengths. Our platform allows students to receive individualised feedback from industry, peers and educators at exactly the right time to drive critical reflection, deep learning, and better performance. Integrated feedback support tools enhance the quality, consistency and timeliness of feedback—the key ingredient of successful learning! Our Team360 assessments also allow you to embed a peer feedback loop into your learning programs.

Easily assess educational outcomes

Practera gives you multiple options for assessing and progressing student learning. You can easily set up different types of assessments, commonly moderated assessments which allow for a feedback loop, along with question-and-answer options such as multiple choice and checkboxes.

For grading student work, Practera offers user-friendly rubrics that help you efficiently provide consistent and impartial grading. You can easily track participant engagement, progress and deliverables, pinpoint any issues with individual students or teams, and support them throughout their PBL experience.

Advanced technology enhances user experience

You can also monitor and quality assure your programs using Practera’s real-time analytics and data dashboards. At a glance, you can quickly identify any issues before they become bigger problems, or dig deeper for more detailed analysis. You can also capture end of program reports.

We even have a world-first AI-assistant, known as ELSA, designed specifically for experiential learning. ELSA provides 24/7 monitoring to provide real-time recommendations based on research- backed learning science, saving you time and helping deliver optimal student learning outcomes.

With COVID-19 meaning some PBL must take place virtually, Practera’s inbuilt feedback, assessment and performance tracking devices allow educational institutions to still deliver PBL activities without sacrificing learning quality.

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Webinar – Delivering Student Project-learning at Scale

Missed our live webinar? Click the link below and watch our webinar video. To equip students with the skills and capabilities they need for the future of work, educators seek to deliver a range of experiential learning programs in and around the curriculum. However, experiential learning with high proportions of in-person engagement can be complex and costly to deliver at scale.

Online models including team-based industry projects potentially offer substantial benefits including lower cost, broader geographic reach and enhanced scalability – but only if quality can be maintained.

The University of New South Wales Business School partnered with edtech startup Practera to design a new class of digital online ‘nano’ projects. These projects have subsequently scaled up and been deployed with students from >60 other institutions in Australia and around the world, including King’s College London.

In this webinar, presenters and panellists will:

• Share experience with designing & deploying digital industry projects & virtual internships to thousands of students
• Share Practera’s recently released research into Quality in Online Project Learning, analysing performance and critical success factors across a sample of 7905 participants from 22 universities, across 124 cohorts and 4 types of programs supported by the Practera platform
• Participate in the live panel discussion, facilitated by host Professor Laura-Anne Bull, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Students, James Cook University, Director Student Experience Strathclyde

Presenters & panellists include:

• Brigitte McKenna, Manager Career Accelerator UNSW Business School, Sydney
• Naomi Hewston, Internships Adviser, King’s College London 
• Beau Leese, CEO & co-founder of Practera 
• Professor Laura-Anne Bull (Facilitator), former Deputy Vice-Chancellor Students, James Cook University, & Director Student Experience, Strathclyde.

Watch video click here

Practera advances to the next round of the $5M XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling Competition.

$5M XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling Competition

Practera is proud to be one of 10 teams globally advancing to the qualified teams round of the $5M XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling Competition, sponsored by nonprofit venture philanthropy organization New Profit in partnership with Jobs for the Future (JFF).

Working with future-focused workforce boards across the US, Practera will develop and demonstrate breakthrough experiential learning solutions to more rapidly train and place displaced & vulnerable American workers into higher-wage, higher-skill jobs. Qualified Teams were selected by an independent panel of experts from among 118 teams from 20 countries.

At Practera, we are inspired by XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling’s vision of a future in which all workers have access to gainful and meaningful employment. A vision that so closely aligns with our mission, values, and work to date.

XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling incentivizes teams to develop and demonstrate the effectiveness of rapid training and reskilling solutions for individuals most vulnerable to employment loss in the United States. The solutions developed in this competition will reduce training time by at least 50% for occupations with a living wage and will be provided at no cost to the individual.

Congratulations to all teams on their achievement – we’re proud to be working alongside some amazing innovators as part of the Future of Work Grand Challenge.

We’re super excited and are looking forward to the competition!

Find out more about our experiential learning technology platform and programs.

Happy Lunar New Year

The Lunar New Year marks one year since the start of the current pandemic for most people.

As we usher in the year of the OX, let’s hope it bring along what it stands for. A year of calmness, stability, great opportunity and economic prosperity.

Wishing all our partners, friends, students and families around the world a very ” Happy Lunar New Year.”

We look forward to another year of achieving positive outcomes for “Learners, Students, Businesses, Universities, Educators and Mentors through Practera’s technology platform, learning design, and programs.

How Can Universities Ensure Students are Work-Ready With Virtual Experiences?

Dino Willox director of student employability at the University of Queensland, and Laura-Anne Bull executive director for academic partnerships at Practera, explain how to develop employability skills virtually especially after the upheaval of Covid-19 to Times Higher Education The Campus. They emphasise that while there are plenty of options for enhancing employability virtually,  it is how students reflect upon and learn from their experiences as an important factor. At practera, we power experiential learning programs with our feedback loops to drive critical reflection, deeper learning and improved performance. As the authors point out, this important ingredient makes students gain enhanced employability skills and get them career ready.

Feedback from students and employers has indicated that by engaging in digital industry projects, enhanced by feedback loops from industry, peers & educators at the right points students fostered and developed much sought-after employability skills and capabilities such as innovation, resilience, emotional intelligence and creativity.

Read the full article on boosting student employability through virtual experiences.

King’s Careers & Employability partners with Practera

We are excited to kickstart 2021 by announcing a new partnership between Practera and King’s College London.

The King’s Careers & Employability team will be using the Practera platform to deliver digital industry projects for students to gain professional insights and develop essential employability skills needed for a modern career.

We look forward to unfolding the partnership and its digital projects in the year ahead.

 

Andrew Wright, Head of Employer Engagement at King’s said, “Practera has demonstrated itself as an industry leader across Australia and other key geographies and we are delighted to help them launch in the United Kingdom in 2020. The platform allows us to develop, design and implement high-quality virtual meaningful work projects for our students, working alongside industry at scale to build unique experiences in these challenging times. We are excited about what we can achieve in 2021 through group projects targeted at final year undergraduate students and those from under-represented groups.”

 

 

Practera Co-Founder & Co-CEO Beau Leese said, “We’re proud to be partnering with a leading Careers Service like King’s College, and delighted to be supporting their vision to build success for students, graduates, staff and employers across King’s College London.”

 

Practera also starts 2021 with a new UK team led by Jane Hallett, Senior Manager Academic Partnerships. Jane returned to London to work with our UK customers following 3 years with Practera in Sydney. Read more about the partnership.