Time: 11:00 AM
Location: CIC Ideation Studio, Building 22, Blackfriars Campus
The Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC) held a ‘Virtual Internships’ (VIs) on Thursday 10th November, 2016.
Given the strategic priority around delivering more authentic assessment and scaling up of internship-like experiences, CIC are working with various faculties and academics across UTS to explore an innovative, research-based way of running practice-oriented internship simulations.
Over a number of years, a team led by the University of Wisconsin Madison (UW-M) have been developing ‘virtual internships’ (VIs) – collaborative professional-practice oriented activities, conducted over ~15 hours, in classroom contexts, using technology to facilitate the process.
CIC have a strong collaboration with the research team behind this work and are keen to explore its potential for UTS as an exciting learning.futures innovation.
The VI offered three games:
- Land science – students assume the role of interns at a fictitious urban planning firm
- Nephrotex – students play the role of interns in a fictitious biomedical engineering design firm
- Rescushell – students play the role of interns at a fictitious mechanical engineering design firm
Following this piloting stage, CIC would like to develop new VI’s to be integrated into a UTS subject, or offered as an internship or ‘internship readiness activity’ to a targeted cohort.
The briefing on 10th November introduced the University of Wisconsin-Madison work and identified stakeholders who might want to pilot one of the existing 3 VIs, or others who might have short professional-practice activities that would lend themselves well to being translated into the VI environment.
See virtualinterns.org for general information, and evidence of its research basis from the UW-M Epistemic Games program.
Contact
Dr Simon Knight
Simon.Knight@uts.edu.au