Last year, nearly 3 million university graduates entered the U.S. Workforce, but a recent study found millennials still make up about 40 percent of the country’s unemployed population. Now, Yale School of Management and EduSourced are announcing a partnership that will integrate real-world experience into student curriculum.
EduSourced is delivering a first-of-its-kind solution designed to support team-based project learning in higher education. Yale will join an impressive and growing list of schools that are leveraging EduSourced’s cloud-based platform to help faculty, students and industry partners better manage business-to-classroom projects.
TechDecisions spoke with EduSourced Founder and CEO David Comisford to learn more about the EduSourced platform, the newest partnership with Yale, and the evolving state of the college curriculum.
TD: What is EduSourced?
DC: EduSourced is helping universities modernize their approach to learning to ultimately better prepare their graduates for the job market. We designed EduSourced, the software platform, specifically for what we call experiential learning, and we designed it with the support of universities. We help school leaders manage and automate employer-based projects – which is what we’re talking about when we say experiential learning – which enables students to integrate what they’re learning in the classroom with real-world use cases while they’re solving business challenges for real companies and employers. The EduSourced web based platform provides students, project sponsors, faculty and staff with one place to connect and collaborate while giving them the tools to capture critical program data, manage workflow and understand the impact they’re having with these student projects on both the student and employer sides. And, with EduSourced, universities are accelerating opportunities for their students after they graduate.
TD: How has college curriculum changed, and how does EduSourced play into that?
DC: The college curriculum has been shifting. It depends on what type of college discipline you’re talking about, but if you’re talking about engineering, for example, this has been popular for the past few decades where they have students do a senior capstone or design course for a company before they graduate. This has become really popular in business schools in the last several years, the idea being to get the students more real world learning, practice and exposure to employers all while they’re still a student. The school can handle the pedagogical side, unlike an internship where the student’s kind of own their own with the employer. So the shift has been toward more real-world learning for the student.
TD: Can you tell me about the new partnership with the Yale School of Management?
DC: Sure. Yale is one of our newer clients. They have the Center for Customer Insights, the YCCI program, and they take elite groups of students that have been selected by the school, they pair them with faculty, and then they work with employers to solve real business challenges. They’re providing high end services akin to a full consulting project or engagement that an employer would pay for. The employers they work with are usually Fortune 100 companies. They come to the program because they want a fresh lens from a smart, diverse team. The stakes are really high for the client because the clients take these projects very seriously, but also for the students because this goes beyond the typical course work that they would have at other schools.
What YCCI was looking for was an organized, confidential, professional environment where the students can work and collaborate with the employers and faculty. This environment is facing the employers, after all, so they partnered with us to create a more professional experience that matches the level of quality of the deliverables that their stakeholders – i.e. the employers they work with – expect.
TD: How does Yale plan to implement EduSourced into this program?
DC: The way our clients implement EduSourced is they organize all of these student projects – and YCCI is an example of that – to then run through EduSourced so that the employers they work with have a seat at the table and can interact with the student teams. The students will be working on the projects in EduSourced with Yale faculty oversight. So the faculty will be able to check in and understand the student’s progress, how well they’re working together and identify challenges all while presenting a professional face to the client.
TD: Is there any other equipment a school would need to implement EduSourced into their curriculum?
DC: No, EduSourced is a software platform that’s cloud-based, so you really just need a computer and an internet connection.
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