m-Outreach for Engineering Continuing Education: A Model for University-Company Collaboration

Abstract Protective Training through M-Outreach: Model for University Corporate CollaborationA prevalent channel today to convey educational content is the cell phone. Cell phones caninstantly present learners with rich media (text, audio, images and video), opening newopportunities for “just-in-time” education. [University] Continuing Professional Education and[company] are partnering to address this opportunity and reliably deliver multimedia lessons tothe cell phones of professionals both on-the-job and in more traditional continuing educationcourses. The collaboration’s goal is to leverage the unique attributes of a new m-outreachtechnology in appropriate learning situations so as to effectively link educational coursework toindustry needs. By so doing, workplace knowledge both of incumbent and unemployedprofessionals can be improved.The paper describes technical aspects of the new m-outreach tool and its pilot evaluatedapplication in training emergency health and safety responders. It presents a framework forunderstanding ways in which university-company collaborations take shape; and, after placingthis example within the framework, discusses variables facilitating success for all partiesconcerned—the collaborating company/university and learners.[Company], a tenant in [university] high tech business incubator, holds the technology to pushmultimedia training to cell phones regardless of the carrier or model of the phone and thus todeliver relevant theme-specific videos to users’ cell phones without their intervention (e.g., nobrowsing for information). With nothing more than cell phones, learners are able to replay andforward lessons either directly or via any social networking web site. Unlike the constraints oftext messaging, multimedia lessons can contain video and animations with voice narration.[University] which originated 130 years ago to serve the needs of [city, state] manufacturers.Today, alumni represent 25% of the engineers working in a State known for high technologycompanies. Having developed the first “Virtual Classroom®” computer system in the 1980’s,[university] provides education to its students—both youth and professionals—often using thelatest e-learning techniques.Making this technique particularly attractive to continuing education is [company’s] success withdemonstrating its utility to the US Department of Health and Human Services for training mobileemergency responders at a practice exercise replicating a real emergency. In particular, thetechnique helped overcome the challenge to providing incident responders with detailed andaccurate training on chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and/or explosives agents throughevent alert; safety, chemical threat and preparedness instructions; site coordination; and liveincident pictures and videos.With its potential as a valuable m-outreach service in one subject area demonstrated, [company]and [university] will be pursuing the tool’s use to educate other workforces on this and othersubjects. Guiding next steps are the analysis [university] has done to better understand differentmodels of university/company collaboration and then the placement of this partnership in anappropriate context so as to maximize the likelihood of overall success concurrently forprofessional education and commercial business growth.