Cooperative Learning techniques to bridge gaps in academia and corporate

Abstract

Abstract One of the major gaps and concerns from the corporates and the engineering academia when it comes to hiring the fresh engineering graduates is the entire aspect of lack of adequate Social Skills. While the engineering academia focuses a lot more on developing the technical skills of their engineering students, and focusing on several pragmatic approaches in adopting learning technologies through labs and simulations, the gap w.r.t. the social and behavioural skills is steadily widening. Being in the corporate world and having dealt with the engineering freshers from colleges, we see there is very little emphasis colleges are giving on developing the social skills of their students and embedding that into their teaching pedagogy. This needs to be addressed immediately since it takes longer duration to prepare these engineering freshers for the real world where they would need to face the real customers from day 1 of their project work. Unless the freshers are ready with the right skills, even the businesses are not willing to put them on real billable projects with the fear that the customer may reject them or they might be risking their projects by not having the right resources on the project.We have seen some colleges giving special trainings to their students right from the 1st and 2nd year of engineering, but as we know, formal trainings are only useful to some extent and are short lived unless this knowledge is put into practice. What is needed is more comprehensive methodology which is embedded into the overall pedagogy of the engineering educators. Cooperative Learning (CL) theory and its associated techniques can help bridge this gap. In this paper, we describe the major factors that influence CL and proposed set of sub-factors, which we believe to address this shortcoming of lack of adequate social skills amongst the engineering students and making them more employable.