In 2010 the Academy of Management Learning & Education (Vol 9, No 1, pp 61-80) published an article by Narayanan, Olk and Fukami that contains an exploratory model portraying a process perspective to internships. The intership model has three actors: the employing firm, the student, and the university. All three actors play a role in an antecedents phase, a processes phase and an outcomes phase.
Two and a half decades ago (1988), as part of a honnours degree in Training Management a submitted a mini-thesis a cooperative education system model.
- Cooperative education is a strategy where students undergo in-service training and gain work experience as integral part of their curriculum. The experience complements and supplements the academic learning to produce employment ready graduates. The experience must be well planned and supervised.
- A system is network of interrelated components which are in continuous interaction in order to achieve a common goal.
I used Lessing's (1985) training-system model as framework and transpose the various cooperative education elements onto it to depict (see below) a cooperative education system model. A worked for a mining house with a central eduction, training & development (ETD) centre that, among others, made use of learner official (nowadays known as learnerships in the South African context) schemes to staff group mines and refineries with competent middle management people.
Lessing's model consisted of input, transformation and output phases, operational within the organisational environment, which forms part of a bigger social, economic and political environment. Lessing placed the learner central in the transformation phase, surrounded by the trainer, the learning content and the learning environment.
In a cooperative education setting the learner is both student and employee (at least while gaining work experience) and is co-responsible for the success of both the academic and the in vivo (real-life or in-service) learning. The 'trainer' comprise a trilogy, namely the university, the work-based learning mentor and the programme coordinator (often the case of industry-based programmes). The learning environment is both the university and the workplace. The learning content comprise both the academic curriculum, as well as the in vivo learning, which often extends beyond the university curriculum to organisational specific learning requirements.
Download 'Download A Co-operative Education System Model - Thesis - Scanned' alternatively the full text is available on request from dr.t.groenewald <at> gmail.com on request.
Post updated 4 January 2013.
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