Learning Launch, "Professional Laboratory".

Francy Ramos

Challenge

Currently, I work for the Arab Open University with the position of Welfare Coordinator for the  Faculty of Engineering, where I mainly develop strategies to maintaining the permanence of  students and leading them to timely graduation. Throughout investigations carried out with the  Student Welfare department, we realized the dropout rate of students is higher during the first 4  semesters, which is why we set ourselves as a challenge to be able to combat this issue. The Faculty  of Engineering and the Department of Student Welfare participated in this project, forming a team  of engineers and psychologists, where we outlined a solution aimed at carrying out a strategy that  would promote love for their career from the first semesters or even the identification of his real  study vocation. An important part of the identification process was considering groups of students  from these semesters to really discover what they were looking for and their reasons for dropout.       Selection    Currently, the project is in a final phase, where we want to test the strategy designed using the  learning launch tool. This tool will allow us to execute the solution in a real learning environment,  experiment style, to learn from it and improve the solution given the observed results. This tool was  chosen because we needed to experience the solution in a real environment to observe the results  and the students' experience with this new wellness strategy.      Application    After 3 months of construction of the new permanence strategy, we visualize a solution that we  called "Professional Laboratory", which consists of an experience fair where students can  experience the different Engineering careers and their work areas, in such a way that they identify  their career and know in early semesters the passion of being an engineering professional; This  approach based on the previous design phases, where we discovered that a large part of the  population of engineering careers was not really clear about the professional profile of their career  or was demotivated by the cycle of basic sciences, and this was due to their desertion.    For the launch of the "Professional Laboratory" learning, we worked with the Faculty of  Architecture, to be able to visualize a space with different environments, where each of the  University's engineering careers could be reflected. In parallel, we formed small work teams per  career, with the participation of engineering professors, education experts, psychologists, and  students, for the construction of professional experiences as practical workshops that could be  developed in these adapted environments. Additionally, students from upper semesters were  trained so that they themselves would be the ones to develop the activities with students from  lower semesters, in this way there is a dynamic of trust. With all this, we built an experience fair  with different environments that visualized engineering careers, where activities related to the  professional areas of each one were developed and, in turn, first-semester students could interact

with other students, allowing a space of trust and fidelity.    At the end of the launch, we asked the participants to fill out an anonymous satisfaction survey, we  interviewed some students from first semesters, as well as collaborators from higher semesters; in  this way we would have a panorama of perception of the experience from different perspective.      Insight

Applying the learning launch tool we were able to obtain real results of the level of satisfaction with  the permanence strategy, in order to contrast the hypothetical ideas we had of the solution with  what we could really learn from the experience. This is the case from the perspective of the  collaborating students (upper semesters), although they were willing to participate, many of them  did not have a vocation for service or empathy with the students, and even did not clearly handle  some issues. Even though training of the students was considered, and a detailed selection process  was carried out, the satisfaction surveys showed this aspect to improve.

Approach

The work team of this project considers that in general, there were positive results from this first  launch, however, there are points to improve to make this experience something more value for the  permanence of the students. I believe that this Learning Launch tool can allow us to continue  exploring changes in the strategy until we reach the final solution, but all based on the information  gathered from the previous event and the aspects observed in the development. Currently, we are  visualizing this same conditioned space, but with the participation of engineering graduates, which  turn into a space where it is shown that it is done from the companies where they work and the  workshops can continue to be developed. This is an idea under construction, but it could be our next  launch.

