Work-based learning (WBL) is one of the most exciting and important aspects of career and technical education (CTE) programs. Through work-based experiences, internships, and apprenticeships, learners in CTE programs have the unique opportunity to develop specialized skills that uniquely qualify them for work in a wide range of industries and professions.
But many CTE programs struggle with effectively tracking work-based learning, leaving them without the full picture of where their district is successful and potentially missing out on funding opportunities to further develop their programs.
To help administrators and teachers better track student performance in work-based learning experiences, Eduthings provides robust data reporting features that capture and measure these experiences along with demographic information and other vital metrics unique to CTE programs.
But how exactly does Eduthings track this information, and how does collecting information specific to WBL aid your CTE program in planning for the future?
In this article, we’ll review the importance of work-based learning in measuring the success of a CTE program. Then, you’ll learn how Eduthings provides a custom solution to capture and report this data to help your program plan for long-term success.
Why Is Work-Based Learning Important to CTE Program Success?
Along with earning industry certifications, work-based learning is one of the most important determinants of CTE program success. This is because WBL allows students to learn firsthand from industry professionals, helping to prepare them for careers in the pathways of their choosing.
Work-based learning involves several types of related experiences, all of which encourage collaboration between CTE programs and industry partners.
Most WBL experiences fall into two categories:
- Informal work-based experiences (WBE), such as classroom speakers, site visits, and other opportunities enjoyed by groups of learners or even entire classrooms.
- Formal work-based learning programs, such as internships and apprenticeships, typically involve individual students working on-site with a mentor or company.
Classroom instructors may find that it’s more appropriate to use work-based experiences with younger students, while reserving more formal training for upper-level learners.
Both types of work-based learning opportunities work together to assist students in building sought-after skills and preparing them for specific opportunities right out of high school.
Ultimately, CTE programs who have many students enrolled in work-based learning evidence strong relationships with industry partners. When organizations in a school’s local community are willing to trust CTE programs and work with their students, it’s a recipe for long-term success when graduates are placed in desirable jobs.
Schools that evidence thriving WBL programs demonstrate a strong emphasis on CTE and show that their programs are an asset to their communities.
Are Schools Required to Report Work-Based Learning Data?
Every school district must report on the performance of its CTE program to the proper state and federal education agencies. Although the specific requirements can vary from state to state, individual programs are typically not required to report on work-based learning programs and experiences.
However, that doesn’t mean your program should ignore information related to WBL. In fact, WBL participation data, when combined with other key information such as your industry certification rate and number of completers and concentrators, help form a more complete picture of your CTE program and how well it’s performing.
Ultimately, it’s important to realize that while your state may only require you to disclose a few statistics related to your CTE students, recording a wider variety of data can tell a more complete story—and better set you and your program up for future success.
How Does Eduthings Track Work-Based Learning Performance?
Effective management of large quantities of CTE data can be challenging. Eduthings streamlines data collection and management with an integrated system designed to improve accuracy and save time.
Eduthings simplifies the tracking process by making it easy for teachers and administrators to record WBL information for everyone from individual students to entire programs. The data management system accomplishes this by allowing you to record both formal work-based learning programs and informal work-based experiences.
At the same time, the Eduthings solution maintains data integrity by ensuring that all of your information is individualized to each pathway, class, and student. Instead of only calculating simple metrics, such as which students have taken part in WBL, Eduthings allows for individual records for each student including journaling, ensuring that each learner’s entire experience is preserved.
Most importantly, Eduthings connects with your current student information systems (SIS) and updates automatically. You can be confident that you always have the most up-to-date record of WBL performance in your program.
Once you’ve integrated Eduthings, you can quickly construct customized reports to analyze the role work-based learning plays in your program. You can even run a specific report to prove the economic impact your work-based learning efforts have on your community!
How Does Eduthings Simplify Work-Based Learning Data Management?
Organizing large quantities of program information can be difficult. Eduthings intuitively simplifies data management processes by capturing the full breadth of work-based learning in your program.
Educators can track every type of work-based learning opportunity within their programs, including data unique to particular CTE pathways, classes, and learners. With Eduthings, you’re able to pinpoint where learners benefit from participating in WBL and where building industry partnerships has helped your program and community.
When teachers move on to other opportunities, all their records are saved in a secure online system, so you never lose track of critical information.
With updated statistics at your fingertips, you can use both your work-based learning and work-based experience reports to refine your CTE program and further promote student success.
What Types of Work-Based Learning Reports Are Available in Eduthings?
Because Eduthings is intended exclusively for CTE, work-based learning reports are built into the data management system. You can easily create reports to highlight work-based learning, giving you a comprehensive look at how it relates to other components of your program.
However, we recognize not every work-based opportunity is the same, which is why Eduthings offers two different types of reports to coincide with distinct categories of learning experiences.
Below, you’ll discover how Eduthings tracks both traditional work-based learning (WBL) programs as well as other work-based experiences (WBE).
Work-Based Learning (WBL)
Conventional work-based learning programs involve individual students working at a particular company or organization, often being paid for their time as interns or apprentices. These programs are designed to give more advanced students firsthand experience working in a career pathway so that they’re ready to pursue full-time employment once they’ve finished their CTE program.
Within Eduthings, WBL has its own category, which allows teachers to track important information relevant to each learner’s individual WBL opportunity, such as student time sheets and journaling. Students are able to upload their own time sheets and complete journal exercises directly in Eduthings, saving effort for their supervising instructors.
Eduthings also features the capacity to track important guiding documents for WBL arrangements, such as pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship training agreements and skill sets. When you load these critical documents into Eduthings, they’ll be stored securely so you can better document each student’s WBL journey.
Work-Based Experiences (WBE)
In addition, to formal, paid work-based learning, Eduthings also tracks work-based experiences (WBE). These informal, classroom-based exercises enhance learning for students throughout CTE programs.
WBE typically includes opportunities like guest speakers or company visits. Because they’re often completed by groups of students or even entire classes, Eduthings makes it easy for teachers to track WBE.
Within Eduthings, work-based experiences are tracked similarly to career and technical student organizations (CTSOs). Teachers can create a particular activity as a work-based experience, choose the number of hours for that activity, and select which learners took part in the experience.
Tracking work-based experiences separately allows administrators to see both the impact of traditional WBL partnerships as well as the contributing role WBE experiences play in developing learners for lifelong success.
What Is the Value of the Eduthings WBL Reports?
By integrating Eduthings, you can empower data management for your entire team and CTE program.
The various reports available through Eduthings can help you build a deep understanding of work-based learning (WBL) and work-based experiences (WBE) in your program and how they work together to promote skills development and career opportunities. More importantly, you can make direct connections between work-based learning initiatives and overall achievement within your CTE program.
Most data management tools produce simple reports, such as whether a student is a CTE completer or concentrator. These reports give you just enough information to comply with state and federal reporting requirements, but hardly offer a full understanding of your whole program, including WBL performance and participation.
Using Eduthings, educators can build complex reports with many filters to pinpoint work-based learning and work-based experience data and show its correlation to the success of students and programs. Where other data management tools track only a few figures related to CTE program data, Eduthings illuminates the entire picture of work-based learning, including both traditional internships and apprenticeships as well as classroom visits, business tours, and other work-based experiences.
Eduthings custom reports results in a more nuanced understanding of data that fully articulates the value of WBL to your program and community.
Lastly, Eduthings customizes and simplifies data entry to align with your district’s preferences. This gives you the flexibility to allow teachers, school leadership, or district CTE staff to enter work-based learning information. Because these statistics are synchronized nightly through Eduthings, you can save time and delegate data entry to your team while keeping information secure and accurate.
Discover How Eduthings Can Track Your Work-Based Learning Performance
Engaging in work-based learning activities is an important sign of a CTE program's health and growth. Programs with many students engaged in work-based experiences, internships, and apprenticeships evidence a commitment to engaged learning and preparing individuals for lifelong success.
When you prove that your students are learning, your school could be eligible for new and continued funding opportunities that allow you to expand your program.
To understand the full value WBL provides to your school district, it’s important that you track work-based learning with a data management system intended for CTE programs like yours.
Above, we’ve covered how Eduthings is specifically designed to track work-based learning and other key CTE statistics, simplifying data collection and compliance. Yet how can you know for sure that Eduthings can assist in your district’s particular situation?
The best method to see how Eduthings can benefit your program is to sign up for a personalized demo. When you sign up, our team will provide you with a customized demonstration of Eduthings so you can see how it will integrate with your current technology systems and measure information critical to your program.
Sign up today on the Eduthings home page:
