Abstract:

Introduction:
As Moore’s Law continues to fuel technological change along with the new skills required for filling the resulting positions these changes generate in industry, traditional secondary schools are lagging further and further behind in keeping their curriculums up to date at a level that produces potential employees to fill the new positions. This condition leaves both entities at a loss in terms of meeting their respective market’s needs: schools are not offering programs that place potential students in high-tech and high paying jobs and employers suffer in the resulting dearth of an employee pool to fill their open positions.
It is illogical to assume that this problem can be resolved in a reasonable timeframe without close collaboration between both the schools and industry. Recognizing this, Athens Technical College (Athens Tech) reached out to employers and entrepreneurs in both the regional and global marketplace to address the issue.

Background:
Utilizing big data, Athens Tech was able to identify
a.) the emerging technologies fields generating the most buzz in the social media blogosphere,
b.) the key trends of emerging technology jobs being posted on both online job matching services and on employer websites
c.) the correlation between these two sets of data points.
Once the most critical job roles were identified, industry partners were selected and the development of the new curriculum strategy commenced.

Methods:
Selected industry partners provide Athens Tech role-based task inventories for the targeted job roles within their industry, e.g. precision agriculture, robotics, and cloud computing. These tasks are broken down into one or more core competencies and then each competency is broken down into one or more learning objectives. Each of these learning objectives is measured by an instructor or mentor observing the student performing the hands-on task related to the learning objective. The execution of the task is rated across a spectrum of four proficiency levels applying a standard Rubric developed in tandem with the involved industry partner(s).
Students in the program are immersed in an Agile-inspired learning cycle that rotates through the following phases: self-paced expositive and interactive content related to the pre-requisite knowledge and context of the tasks they will be executing; assessment on the mastery of pre-requisite knowledge required to successfully execute the task; self-paced remediation as required on pre-requisite knowledge; cognitively-scaffolded guided practices through the hands-on task; and Rubric-assessed solo practices aimed at measuring the student’s mastery level of task execution.
In addition to the hands-on oriented classroom and lab experience, students are provided with a number of career oriented activities including shadowing, mentoring, apprenticeship, and internship opportunities with the industry sponsors to fully prepare them for a smooth transition into the workplace.
Students are also continuously prepped and assessed on their workforce readiness through Athens Tech’s “Workplace + Lifeskills” program. Attributes evaluated include punctuality, appropriate dress, time tracking, respectfulness, presentation skills, workplace attitude, teamwork, and conflict resolution.

Conclusions & Extensions:
This success of this collaboration model is gaining interest and participation in areas outside of emerging technology including education, business, and life sciences.

Keywords:

Big Data, Emerging Technology, Flipped Classroom, University-Industry Collaboration.