New Career Readiness Modules and Badges Coming Soon
The IT Center of Excellence is happy to announce that the library of Career Readiness D2L Modules is expanding.
Due to the success of our existing modules, the Center is building five new modules, focused on teaching students the following skills:
- Creative Problem Solving
- Critical Thinking
- Empathy
- Intercultural Fluency
- Resilience
The new Modules will mirror the earlier Modules, leveraging content from the Education Design Lab, and will come with the opportunity for students to earn digital badges.
One of the benefits of using Education Design Lab’s content is the ability to offer badges that are becoming well-recognized by employers, due to the Lab’s numerous higher education partners who are also awarding the badges. Employers were originally involved in defining the skills they sought most from college graduates, which now make up the learning objectives in each Module (see all of the Modules’ learning objectives at the end of this post).
Like in all of the Career Readiness Modules, the new Modules will include readings, videos, practice exercises and assessments for each learning objective. All of the exercises and assessments are tailored to an online asynchronous course, but can be used in hybrid or classroom courses as well. Exercises in the Modules often require students to interact with others, and to sometimes submit video assignments.
Each Module has been designed to be 8-10 hours of work for a student, such that one or two Modules can fit nicely into an existing IT or computer science course.
Faculty interested in getting an early copy of the new Modules and/or who are interested in using one in a future 2020-2021 course can visit www.mnstateitcoe.org/career-readiness-curriculum, or send an email to itcoemodulesupport@metrostate.edu.
Library of Career Readiness Modules and Badges, and their learning objectives:
COLLABORATION AND TEAMWORK
- Strengthen relationships
- Listen actively
- Incorporate diverse perspectives
- Focus on solutions
CREATIVE PROBLEM SOLVING
- Exercise convergent and divergent thinking
- Manage ambiguity
- Apply an iterative process
- Identify patterns
CRITICAL THINKING
- Identify patterns
- Gather and assess relevant information
- Question assumptions
- Draw conclusions
EMPATHY
- Recognize others’ needs and values
- Listen actively
- Incorporate diverse perspective
- Validate others’ feelings
INTERCULTURAL FLUENCY
- Incorporate diverse perspectives
- Show curiosity
- Demonstrate self-awareness
- Challenge one’s own biases
INITIATIVE AND LEADERSHIP
- Lead without title
- Act as catalyst
- Demonstrate self-awareness
- Learn from experience
ORAL AND WRITTEN COMMUNICATIONS
- Speak with clarity and precision
- Use stories to communicate ideas
- Listen actively
- Use appropriate tone and word choice
- Write effective emails
RESILIENCE
- Demonstrate self-awareness
- Learn from experience
- Focus on solutions
- Exhibit flexibility