As an education technology entrepreneur and advocate for enabling improved student employability outcomes, it is always interesting to see how your platform is being used in new ways that drive greater value and improved learning outcomes for students, professors and employers.
Two different faculties at the University of Toronto are using the private network sharing capability of Acadiate to manage classroom assignments to streamline administrative overhead for the instructor.
One faculty is using Acadiate’s Showcase template for assembling a mock Consultant’s IT business proposal that can include documents, summary of a statement of work, a full statement of work, a video introduction, show bio’s of each team member, overview of the fictitious company, marketing material to promote the solution, and other creative assets to make their IT consulting proposal as creative and realistic as possible.
Prior to Acadiate, the students would need to spend time to create an entire website to communicate their business proposal. Often spending more time and effort building the website than developing their business proposal. By using Acadiate’s Showcase, students were focused on the learning objectives of the course. Used in combination with Acadiate’s Cluster or grouping functionality, the teacher was also able to easily to collect and group the students proposals for grading – streamlining the submission and grading process for herself and her students. The instructor suggested she saved 15-20 hours per term using Acadiate over her previous manual methods.
Clusters are not indexed by Google and are private to those who have access to the link and for added security can be password protected. These additional layers of privacy and protection of student information make it a great choice for the classroom setting.
Another usage case was in an internship class. Students would create a Showcase and add a weekly blog documenting their internship experience to their Showcase. The teacher created a Cluster at the beginning of the semester and provided access to the students to share their Showcases with the Cluster. Each week the students updated their Showcase. Changes to their Showcase, automatically reflected in the Cluster. The teacher checked in on the Cluster weekly to review and grade the updated Showcases.
At any point, the teacher has the flexibility to open up the Cluster to their students in the class to browse and review each of their peers blogs, enabling collaborative experiential learning. Administratively, the Cluster took the instructor less than 5 minutes to create and share.
Acadiate is a premium employability platform designed for the special needs of University programs, students, and alumni. As we expand our conversations with more University programs, we receive feedback that some programs do not immediately have the budget to invest in student employability. To help ensure that all university students have some access to the benefits of Acadiate, we have decided to launch a free, introductory product for those programs. Check out Acadiate’s pricing page to see the difference between Acadiate Program Basic (Free) and Acadiate Program Premium for University programs.
