Inter-professional Collaborative Learning for the Enhancement of Employability Skills
Abstract
Inter-professional learning is an important part of professionally accredited courses which enables students to work with other disciplines on project based work to achieve academic learning and essential team working employability skills. With the need for graduates to be more work ready and leave their higher education as a professional it is important that cross disciplinary understanding is achieved in the safe environment of the University and modules such as these enable these attributes to be honed. Professional roles within the built environment are evolving at an unprecedented rate and to be successful within this industry requires graduates to possess developed inter-professional abilities.
This paper presents a case study of a module that has been delivered for 10 years and changed annually from reflection on the learning and student comments to provide greater engagement with the students. The case study is reviewed to enable best practice to be highlighted and a framework for future delivery to be developed.
Literature dealing with collaborative learning in the built environment is reviewed as are methods of team working and theory based models for team building and interaction. This enabled a deeper understanding of how teams work and form.
The findings centre on the impact of the difference interventions that have been introduced, on student engagement on the module. In particular students peer assessment data is used to evaluate the potential impact of the interventions. The data shows that there is likely to be an association between the interventions and student engagement on the module. This in many ways provides ground for module delivery teams to be clear of the anticipated implications.