The need for physical distancing, as result of the coronavirus pandemic, prompted me to undertake a literature review about virtual monitoring of cooperative and work-integrated education (CWIE). The literature of a potentially relevant manuscript, explored the importance of communication frequency for virtual teams. It is believed that what is said could be extrapolated to virtual monitoring of CWIE.
Similar to process coordination being regarded as the ‘black box’ pertaining transforming team inputs are into team outputs, could monitoring be viewed as the ‘black box’ pertaining progress of individual students with regard to CWIE. Monitoring, among others, encourages self-regulation, and the likelihood that students would adjust their performance to correspond with the stated requirements. Caution is expressed that lean media, such as email alone, could result in weak process coordination, which suggest the need for qualitative virtual monitoring.
Reading the manuscript prompted many memories of personal experience, such as:
- While employed at the central education, training and development facility of a group of companies, I devoted many hours to travelling in order to undertake monitoring at remote mines and refineries. Substantial satisfaction had been derived from learning process coordination. Left to the mundane realities of production, students would not necessary have been circulated in order to gain exposure to all the aspects deemed necessary with regard to the stated outcomes of their workplace learning. Frequently, I had to intervene to prevent exploitation of a student’s labours, in the interest of progressing with training.
- A colleague, responsible for another discipline, introduced a control sheet to plot their progress of students, visually displaying time lapsed versus remaining, against outcomes accomplished versus outstanding. A wonderful self-regulating mechanism.
- An erstwhile principal of a university of technology shared the anecdote of his decision on a given day to practice ‘management by observation’, got in a vehicle and drove to a work-site to explore work-based learning in action. He found, to his horror, a civil engineering student working as gate ‘guard’.
- In the middle of the previous century, the then mining industry, started a programme to train production supervisors. Soon the need for proper coordination and overseeing had been realised. That became the model for many decades of training process coordination, which later extended to several technical and support disciplines. [Download A Co-operative Education System Model - Thesis - Scanned]
- Many times, students started working frantically on their portfolios of evidence upon my notification of a monitoring visit. I vividly recall an early middle-aged man identified for advancement. He kept a gym bag in the office into which he deposited samples of all likely relevant documents. Prior to my monitoring visits he would retrieve his workplace learning modules and franticly go about producing his portfolios. He derived immense growth from these spurts of reflecting on the work experiences.
Given the scenario of the absence of a vaccine for coronavirus, and the need for physical distancing, there exists an urgency to adopt virtual monitoring of the workplace-based learning parts of the curriculum of qualifications.
Mc Larnon, M.J.W., Taras, V., Donia, M.B.L., O’Neill, T.A., Law, D. & Steel, P. (2019). Global virtual team communication, coordination, and performance across three peer feedback strategies. Canadian Psychological Association, 51(4), 207-218.