Time: 03:30 PM
Location: UTS Building 7, Level 2, Room 25 | 67 Thomas Street | Broadway | Sydney, NSW 2007 | Australia
Virtual Internships have the potential to revolutionise education.
Imagine classes that have thousands of students – like MOOCs – but where students learn more than just how to take good notes in a lecture and pass a traditional test. Virtual internships are Massively Adaptive Complex Realistic Online Simulations with Interactive Mentoring. They are web-based simulations that help students learn to think like scientists, scholars, artists, and workers.
In a virtual internship, students work in teams on challenging real-world problems that require innovative solutions. They conduct research, interview clients, develop and test prototypes and work with their peers to weigh the importance of technical, commercial, and ethical factors.
In VIs, students learn by doing, with access to professional resources and a mentor who can guide their individual learning processes. Teachers can customize both learning scenarios and the learning analytics that model students’ performance.
Virtual internships show what is possible when principles of learning science, learning analytics, and technology are brought together into an integrated learning system for the 21st century.
Professor David Williamson Shaffer (University of Wisconsin-Madison) explained how Virtual Internships can help support students develop their professional identities.
About Professor David Williamson Shaffer
David Williamson Shaffer is an internationally recognized expert on teaching and assessing 21st Century skills through educational games. He is best known for the development of Virtual Internships for students in high school and college and for corporate training and assessment, as well as his work using quantitative ethnography to measure complex thinking.
Dr Shaffer is a highly sought-after speaker, teaching a course at the University of Wisconsin on making effective presentations. He is currently the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Game Scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer was a teacher, teacher-trainer, curriculum developer, and game designer, including work with the Asian Development Bank and US Peace Corps in Nepal and as a 2008-2009 European Union Marie Curie Fellow. His Ph.D. is from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of How Computer Games Help Children Learn (New York: Palsgrave MacMIllan, 2006) and Quantitative Ethnography(Madison, WI: Cathcart Press, 2017).