Addendum: Every Open-ended Response

Every substantive written response to each of the open-ended benchmark questions is listed here. These are the raw responses, and any original typos or mistakes are preserved.

Are there any innovations or new components to your experiential initiatives that you are especially excited about?

There are components of our projects that have immediate or near-term policy impacts at the local and state level, ex. legislative concepts that get adopted into law. Immediate or near term impact is not always the case with planning and policy work and so it is deeply meaningful to us and to our students when we see our work in action. Many of our projects also have public engagement and outreach components in which we test out new ideas or methods. The students can bring an infusion of new energy to communities that encourages them to think in new ways.

The projects that our students participate in or lead are generally identified by the organization in which they do their residencies, so as the healthcare industry changes and evolves, our students’ projects evolve. For example, we now see more projects related to AI use in healthcare.

Incorporating both entrepeneurial projects from the students and collaborations with community partners in sustainability

At the beginning the capstone projects were innovative and flexible. In recent years the university has shifted focus and funds on research at the expense of students’ learning outcomes.
Finding ways to explicitly incorporate AI into the projects.

Not necessarily but we do stay up-to-date on what is happening globally in the business world. We are more focused on the application of AI in management consulting and are showing students how to use it.

Our ability to run our program within a research design center within the ME department allows us to function like a consulting company and allows the students to have a trial year as a entry-level engineer. We emulate working as a entry-level engineer as much as possible. Most teams are 7-14 people. Their are team roles for every member of the team allowing for accountability and a shared leadership model, no grades during the semester (performance evaluations at the end of each semester that translate to a grade), each team has their own credit card and budget, and every portion of the class uses industry language. We treat our Seniors like engineers, not students.

We are in the process of launching a new brand identity for these projects.

We have a very unique program structure where the project areas grow organically with the industry needs. This past year we started two new Enterprise teams/areas and are planning to start two more in the coming academic year.

AI required starting in the fall semester.

I’m not sure. I’ve only taught for one year.

Yes, we introduced team building activities as soon as project teams were formed. These include tower building and a team scavenger hunt. We also added two team presentations for their preliminary and critical design reviews.

We have a unique way to teach an agile methodology agile project management
The goal is to go multidisciplinary

New capstone rollout with a focus on software innovation techniques

Emphasis on long-term durability Passion in student-proposed projects Inclusion of design competition teams (FSAE foe example) in capstone program

Not sure as I just joined the program.

Our school is launching a multidisciplinary pilot program across engineering disciplines.

We are in the middle of a complete re-design under the auspices of a NSF RED grant.

Implementing AI tools as learning block modules

not really, mostly manage scope and expectations

Growing the interdisciplinary nature of the projects for the students
We have recently increased our capacity to work with start-ups by offering some flexibility/scalability in the fee we charge.

Flexibility for the student and sponsor to determine deliverables and timeline together. It takes more work on the program side, but ends up being more valuable to the project sponsors and give the students experience in working that out with the sponsor.
Vertical integration assignments across different student levels (sophomores, juniors, and seniors)

We’re excited about collaborations that can turn into IP for the School/College.

Assessment, reflection, a new clinical program with AI

We are starting to explore what it would look like to have a more embedded relationship between the student teams and the clients. Currently, it’s a pretty typical consulting relationship where the teams meet periodically with clients to ensure the project remains on track. To of our Masters degrees are moving to 1 year programs and the experiential Capstone is shifting to happen in 8 weeks (1 summer term) instead of 6 months (winter and spring terms). As we make this shift, I’m thinking about what it would look like if the students were actually working in the office of the clients and if both students and project partners participated in some of the class sessions together so there was more emphasis on building capacity for the partners in addition to the students. This does start to make it seem more like an internship, but I’m imagining it having much more wrap-around support than a typical internship, and I think the co-learning/capacity-building part would be different as well.

Artifical Intellegience, Gabal impact, Student based team projects (TBL)
Edusourced implementation, use of Project Management and Systems Engineering, Joint projects between disciplines
AI, machine learning, data science, robotics, cloud services. We are introducing AI as a way to expand our efforts. Our use of project management has increased over the years and is a strong point for our students to be able to step into jobs more confidently. I regularly consult with industry partners in technology areas to make improvements.

We have implemented the Biodesign Innovation program of Stanford University in a way that suits our students and our ecosystem really well.

We are starting to track job placement post-projects, and we are excited to start seeing that percentage increase.

No. To be honest, we’re not as aggressive as other universities in the area.

Not that I can think of. We are trying to think of ways to be more organized with all of the clients and communicate as a team.

I don’t enforce and present ideas rather that students generate their ideas based on their interest, I am just tuning it to be alinged within the requirements and time allocation.

Adoption ofAI guidance and use rules
Brand new – transformational experience requirement (two) Cross disciplinary project courses across all four year, every student International Internship cohorts

Aerospace industry and HVAC industry projects

After 2 faculty cohorts of training to do EL/or action learning, the faculty have asked for regular instructor meetings. We began with a meeting at the beginning of the semester, a mid-point and an end of year meeting. Faculty have since asked for another meeting so we had that last week.

Training for all students in presentations skills to enhance final client presentatations.

Project requests from new courses – bringing need for a variety of project focuses and timeframes.

We use external practitioner coaches for some of the teams through our partnership with strategy consulting firms. We also encourage the use of certain AI tools for secondary research.
None

We have recently extended our projects and internships to new industry leaders in our area.

We are very excited to grow and refine our capabilities offerings to bring student experience in line with industry best-practices. In particular, very interested in and excited about developing full-service suite of laser-based materials processing, both lower-energy (capable of cutting woods, plastics) and higher-energy (e.g. industrial fiber-laser metal-processing) applications.

We are kicking off an internship Expo this semester where students can showcase their internship and the skills that they have been able to apply from the classroom.
Now a graduation requirement

Implementing Agile tools, using machine learning to identify students at risk of struggling to achieve course learning outcomes

What is the biggest challenge with experiential projects in your program?

It takes a lot of faculty capacity to do well – the projects are always different, student needs fluctuate, and not every project fits neatly within a term schedule. Student teams that struggle with team dynamics or interpersonal issues can really derail their progress on a scope of work and require more faculty support than we always budget for. In these cases, faculty may make decisions to scale back the work, step in to do more coaching, or shift learning goals to focus on team work. These decisions are guided by our objectives to meet the learning outcomes of the course that the project is embedded in AND deliver a quality work product, which may fall on faculty to complete.

Project recruitment for over 1000 students in the program annually
Confidentiality. We expects students to work with actual organization financial and other outcome information. Increasingly, organizations are hesitant to either give our students access to that information, and/or to use that information when reporting on their projects.

Finding appropriate projects and then client support through the project

University bureaucracy.

Getting more external partners. The majority of our projects for the Environmental Data Science program come from researchers/faculty. Expanding to external clients has proven more difficult.
Maintaining a steady flow of projects year round–fall, winter and summer.

Time required to select clients and manage student teams

Resources. Our program growth has been 30% for the last two years and will continue. We are out of space for physical prototyping. There are too many students and not enough faculty, staff and sponsors to support the way that we are capable.
Finding level-appropriate projects with industrial clients

Finding clients who fit the time frame necessary

Student and advising support.
Obtaining the internship

* Impact of AI–it is reducing client’s desire to work with students. * Sourcing projects.
Forming effective teams.

Consistent client interactions and engagement

Students to cope up with the fast paced program of 6 months

Getting sponsored projects from the industry

International sudent enrollment and recruiting project sponsors

Funding

Aligning client expectations with student experiences.

Coordination at the school level
Getting students to join an industry sponsored project.

Sponsored Projects and IP
Soliciting enough projects. We always get enough, but it’s tight.

soliciting industry project partnerships
Students thinking that they know everything about design because of a prior hands on experiential course. Too many hands on courses focus on the doing without making sure students understand the why behind the various steps in the process.

Biggest challenge: recruiting projects from companies! Second biggest: every project is different, so it is difficult and time consuming to grade each report and presentation.

Within the one year of experience, the biggest challenge seems to be finding clients with projects.

Externally, recruiting. Internally, team dynamics

Funding and infrastructure.
Not all team members contribute equally and teams have difficulty properly using a Gantt Chart for project management.

Changing requirements

Having enough space for students to work
Aligning sponsor expectations with learnign outcomes

Project fit

sourcing projects

Getting consistent funding to run a large capstone program for 400 students and 70+ projects

Not sure as I just joined the program.

Meeting prototype delivery and schedule deadlines

Assigning students, based on their project interest and technical skillset, to faculty-led, industry-led, and student-proposed projects. Also assigning faculty mentors to 55+ projects.

Scaling our current approach for our growing class size is a major challenge

More projects, more managers, not enough time.

having them meet learning objectives for all students

Inequity in student outcomes based on selection of project/team

Keeping funding in place so student teams can collaborate with and learn from the community. Finishing projects in 2 semesters so that we can see demonstrable success with experiential / community-engaged projects.

getting enough good projects

Every student gets a different experience. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes this is not so good.

Breaking the” afraid to fail” syndrome. Getting the faulty involved

Application of industry standards to projects – some standards can be difficult to find, and some projects may not easily incorporate standards

Program growth creating significant resource constraints.

Managing the total number of students/projects across the college

Finding enough high-quality projects.
grading and the faculty resources required

Finding enough high-quality sponsored projects

Administrative tasks such as obtaining and managing 35 different projects

Team dynamics Student backgrounds
Courses adjusting their curriculum to bake in the projects, experiential learning being a requirement

Connecting with industry partners and designing a project to fit a course’s learning objectives

Resources for the students

Getting enough projects – we run about 250 per year!

Our Institute (which manages all the experiential capstone courses for the School) is soft funded. This means we need paying clients for these projects to cover the significant effort we put into curating projects, managing client relationships, and mentoring students. The School does cover some of our FTE for teaching these courses, but it is not enough to cover the amount of time we need to dedicate to the projects. The biggest challenge is funding our time – our project partners’ ability to pay for projects varies greatly which means we are often cobbling together funding sources which it time- and labor-intensive.
Converting outcomes into measurable data for the College of Business.

University financial and rsource support
Cross department faculty coordination
procuring sponsors and having them make a financial contribution

Experiential projects with external partners require a lot of setup, maintenance, and followup, which requires more resources. Currently the resources in our school are diminishing, so I am going to have to figure out how to simplify things.

The project are very open-ended and so students struggle initially to understand expectations

finding challenging but doable projects for the students that are not all the same.
Finding clients and managing expectations.
Building a system that can easily be turned over to a faculty member for them to use on their own in their classes.

Connecting sponsors and students with projects of appropriate scope.

Finding enough projects for student interest. Finding paid sponsors for the larger classes doing a shared project.
continuously acquiring new partners IP hesitancy

We communicate well through email, but not a lot of clients check their emails consistently and they get confused.

Finding client companies

More student demand than sponsors
not sure

Keeping students’ motivation momentum due to other requirements during teh semester.

Finding C-Level problems to solve. Or having a client which wants too much for one semester’s worth of work. We work hard to set client expectations before giving the work to our graduate students to work on. Sometimes this requires us to split the work out over multiple semesters, where it becomes iterative.

Team formation

finding clients

Getting interdisciplinary student participation approval from single discipline departments

Gathering sufficient projects for discipline-specific areas

International travel visa challenges
Faculty are not rewarded for doing so

There is not one biggest challenge. Challenges include sourcing projects, having projects of equal weight, finding good mentors, knowing enough about a topic to support/direct a team towards fruitfall efforts, keeping teams engaged when covering topics that may not pertain to thier team but may be necessary for another team, communicating with both partners and teams, matching student teams to projects, and managing team dynamics.

Scope management
Data Analytics projects – companies are more hesitant to do a project where they must send company data for the students to analyze – corporate data securuity

trying to scale it to more students on limited resources

Obtaining enough qualified projects for the quantity of students registered for the course

Finding placements and programs for all students who want to participate. Finding funding/payment for our students who can’t work while they are participating in these external experiential projects.

Communication
scaling the volume with consistent quality

Matching student skills with project needs. In particular, students’ engagement, initiative, and participation. There is limited time to understand/recruite the student.

Consistency of grading from faculty, reluctance of faculty to grade
Not being able to track internships that are not for course credit. We know students are completing them but do not have a way to track them.

Legal documentation, MOU’s, NDA’s, travel waivers…when they’re needed, when they’re not. Getting faculty/partners to complete what we’d like
improving teamwork of faculty and students

Funding and resourcing. We charge but in the current economic landscape and AI exploration we are having a more challenging time finding paying clients (we exclusively execute ELPs for a MS in Business Analytics. Other staff in the school execute in other departments)

Time

The logistics of managing the large number of unique projects (currently ~80-90/year), each with their own specific needs

Coordinating with students’ schedules
Projects that can be completed in one semester.

What is one piece of advice you would like to share with other schools who either have experiential programs, or are considering launching one?

Clear communication of project expectations to clients and to students. Scoping projects appropriately is critical – especially when it needs to absorb unexpected changes or project needs that arise. Having flexibility to finalize projects after students complete their portion help our program do quality assurance and maintain a positive reputation.

Highly structured process

Our onsite residency experiences have a profound positive influence on our students. Students return for the second year of their MHA program with a much stronger sense of healthcare operations, greater confidence, and significantly enhanced leadership skills.

Clearly express to students and sponsors what to expect. Reasonable, conservative expectations at the beginning are crucial: under promise, over deliver.

Develop a franchise across the school that engages faculty, staff, alumni and the career placement office. This cannot be a go it alone strategy.

Keep group sizes small to avoid loafers
When structuring the class, ask yourself “how will I teach professional skills in a authentic way.” Too often we talk to them like they are students when coaching on professional skills. If you provide feedback like you would to a colleague or employee, it will land better with the students. For example, when they are being unprofessional – start the conversation with “as some coaching advice….” The students will figure out the technical part, but they need help learning to be a professional to be successful at their design projects. Design is a social process!
This should be a joint academic-administrative endeavor with full support from faculty and staff.

It takes a lot of overhead.
Emphasize learning not outcomes.

Be all in… Don’t second guess this.

Considering have two semester program to account for better learning by all students
The programs have to be included within the curriculum for more students to participate and it being a mainstream educational component that all students have access to.

Leverage your alumni

Self-selected teams, Agile methodology, funding, school support, team size, regular feedback (status, presentations, peer reviews – Scrum) competitions (department, school, university wide, external competitions.
Create clear guidelines for clients.
Be consistent and clear in your expectations to the sponsor

Having a separate department over see the facilities and the logistics is very beneficial

Make sure students understand that they don’t know everything just because they did one hands on project.

Consider how you will grade your students as individuals as well as the team to be fair to those who contribute more to the project than to those who don’t contribute as much as they should.

Bi-weekly schedules seem to be a great success for many of our teams. We used to have weekly class meetings and ask the teams to meet with their clients every week and students reported spending more time preparing for meetings or presentations than doing actual design.
Buy-in from department faculty is critical; having only a few people who value the program and are willing to participate (e.g., if most faculty are more interested in overseeing senior theses) makes it a hard slog.

Negotiate a clear funding model with your University.

Ensure team advisors understand course requirements and expectations and engage weekly with their teams.

Keep refining

Collect lots of feedback from students, sponsors, and faculty mentors, and use that feedback to improve the program.

Securing industry sponsors must be treated like a sales process whether you like it or not (especially if you are the one tasked with doing it).
do it, it’s tremendous value to the students.

It is difficult but well worth it.

Scaffold the deliveries of bench tests, unit tests, field tests, and document deliveries

Do not underestimate the effort involved in developing and maintaining the necessary relationships.

Keep documentation sacred (i.e., have lots of it).

Without having a specific person or program in charge of senior design projects with experiential learning goals, the labor falls on individuals, particularly course instructors. It’s a lot of work as well as lost knowledge when someone moves on from a position.

alumni surveys have shown that Capstone is easily the most impactful class

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Set expectations, Get students involved early,

Attend the Capstone Design Conference!
The benefits to the students are worth the challenges faced
Invest in staff to support business development. Account for faculty advising in teaching load.

It takes a lot of time and work, and it’s important to have enough staff to do it well, but it’s worth it for the students and builds important relationships with outside groups.
Make sure you have significant leadership support

Strongly suggest to implement it

Having someone in charge of experiential learning would help a lot (the lack of one at our school has hurt our efforts).
Help your industry partners understand this is not merely an internship . . . these students (or student teams) can represent a true influx of energy, passion, knowledge that can help ANY organization.

This is a faculty-staff collaboration. Value your staff who can be experts on working with external organizations. Resource well.

It’s well worth it. It really helps if you have professional faculty who are dedicated to this type of engagement. We have found projects to be less successful when tenure-track faculty are in the lead. As career professional faculty, we understand the kind of relationship building with clients that needs to happen and how to shape projects to meet clients’ real world needs. We find that this approach often does not align well with most tenure-track faculty’s approach to research.

Start the program with the end in mind. Develop the program around outcomes that prepare students for their future.

Needs an instructor with industry experience.

Hire someone to manage the program, drum up industry partners, and shepherd them from the contractual process through to presentations and post mortems
I recommend keeping careful records in order to track projects and count metrics and use social media to get the word out.
Strongly consider creating an offering that allows students from different faculties to work together.

It is one of the best experience for the students. They gain a lot of confidence by working on real world problems.

Do it. The students who take it seriously are becoming our top tier students at graduation.

Develop a process for contacting and maintaining contact with local and regional industry partners to facilitate repeated opportunities for students to do this kind of learning.

Utilize the Career Center & Alumni Center because both kinds of contacts want to “get in the classroom”. EL should be part of the onboarding for new companies contacting Career Services.

Don’t just assign projects. I like the way the bidding process works. let the students choose what they are passionate about and they will either be really engaged or learn directly that they need to change their path.

Require a lot of effort by faculty, but more than worthwhile in terms of student engagement and learning

Set clear expectations with sponsors
interdisciplinary

engaging the students or th elearb]ners with the whole process of learning and listen to their views and ideas.

Have your faculty or administrator make strong business connections. This will help you source projects for students to work on. Also if you can record or share work as an example to clients, that is also helpful.

Give clear guidance on how to execute such projects

provide adequate faculty support
Gather data and metrics that track performance, satisfaction, engagement and interest.

Do it! They strengthen your students, create hiring and job opportunities and give real-world experience for those who may not be able to do a traditional internship or coop.
Brace for a 1-2 year lead time for launching these projects. Prepare for internal project infrastructure and coordination costs.
Go all in

Develop a community of practice for your faculty – support them. This type of teaching is a heavy lift and needs to be recognized as a 1.5 (min.) for teaching loads.

Integrate professional presentation and business writing skills into the experiential program, to professionalize how students work with clients.

Get everybody (Corporate Engagement, Advancement, Career Management, etc) talking about the fact that your school does projects to increase the inflow of potential clients

spending time optimizing the student teams on dimensions like GPA, # years work experience, diversity metrics, and others pays dividends in supporting strong outcomes

The entire department has to be involved in soliciting projects, it cannot be done by 1 or 2 people.

Absolutely do it! It is the best way to get students prepare for their future careers!

Make sure you are well-engaged with industry partners across a wide range of specific disciplines to ensure you have a strong network of both informational and potential donation resources. In particular, look to develop relationships with organizations similar to the Oregon Machining Industry Consortium (OMIC) both for student engagement opportunities and informational access to cutting-edge and in-development manufacturing processes.

You need to build the organization around the work and not the other way around. Figure out the tasks, then build a RACI to optimize efficiency and quality to meet the objectives of the program.

To get full participation from the student, you need the class be a full 3 credit
Try to set it up so that you have dedicated graders who are not tenure track faculty
Experiential learning is so important in providing students with career readiness and giving them the edge when applying for jobs post-graduation.

Do it! Student engagement and learning is well worth the effort!
make a plan, measure outcomes and redesign as needed

Build a center for experiential learning vs departmentally staffed teams as enrollment is incredibly unpredictable these days and that allows effort to flow between higher demand as it evolves.
Define project objectives up front.
Have a continuous improvement plan, and focus on one or two changes at a time, even if you see a dozen things that need fixing.

It’s a lot of work but a lot of reward! Worth the effort!

It takes a village

They require a faculty sponsor who is committed.