In higher education’s quiet revolution, skills are learnt on the job

University is now about more than just book learning.

Sometimes, inch by inch, a revolution can occur right under our noses but because it’s incremental it largely escapes attention.

In fact there’s one happening right now. It’s the steady movement towards embedding more work-based learning, or learning by doing, into higher education courses. Universities are increasingly making explicit commitments to get students into real world workplaces to put into practice what they learn during their courses.

Some of it is fairly superficial – a few weeks of work experience, often organised by the student themselves. But we are also seeing major efforts by educational institutions to merge workplace learning into traditional university degrees so that they complement and reinforce each other, making the sum larger than the parts.

There are numerous examples. Two years ago Swinburne University announced that work integrated learning was guaranteed in all its bachelor degrees. Federation University has just made a similar commitment, promising a cooperative model in which the university works jointly with industry on student learning. Victoria University has announced a “flipped campus” in which employers join the campus community.

We are also seeing so called higher apprenticeships in which students spend most of their university degree learning in the workplace. And major new public/private investments, such as the Western Sydney Airport, include plans for new industries linked to related tertiary learning.

In some ways this revolution is just placing increased emphasis on things which already occur in some fields of learning. For doctors and other health professionals, practical experience has always been a part of learning. Likewise for teachers, who have always done pracs in the classroom.

The key change now is the recognition that “learning by doing” has an application to all of higher education, even courses with no direct link to a profession. That is because experience in the workplace is a great way to embed skills that are vital in any job – things like effective communication and teamwork, which are highly valued by employers.

The most important thing for higher education which could come out of this week’s Jobs and Skills Summit is support for work-based learning to become the standard. It’s noteworthy, that with its emphasis on practical experience that there is also clear link to vocational education, which offers the opportunity to firm up the ties between the two sectors.