students-collaboration

Wichita State connects students with real-world experiences


WSU’s Applied Technology Acceleration Institute will deepen collaboration between students and industry partners with new Jive-n community.

students-collaborationWichita State University (WSU) has selected Jive Software to help facilitate its applied learning initiatives.

WSU is implementing the Jive-n internal community solution to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing, initially within its Applied Technology Acceleration Institute (ATAI), and eventually amongst the university’s 15,000 students, faculty and staff.

Since October 2014, the ATAI has rapidly built a portfolio of strategic partnerships with industry partners around the country, including, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Palerra and Spirit Aerosystems. The institute connects WSU’s students with these businesses to enable applied and experiential learning opportunities, such as hands-on software development, quality assurance testing, product marketing projects, solution validation and much more.

(Next page: How the approach targets real needs)

This approach addresses and delivers on the real needs of the partners and develops a pipeline of relevant and prepared talent as well.

“Our industry partners consider Wichita State University and the ATAI an important part of their talent plan, and our goal is to reduce the time it takes for new graduates to become productive in their new roles. We’re doing this by bringing best practices from real-world companies into an academic setting,” said Dr. Ken Russell, executive director of the ATAI at WSU.

“For example, Jive’s cutting-edge social capabilities help all kinds of organizations harness their intellectual property and break down silos. With Jive-n as the digital underpinning of our new Center for Social Knowledge, we’ll dramatically enrich student and industry collaboration and productivity, deliver clear business value to our partners, and take huge strides towards our higher education mission.”

Jive implementation partner iTalent Corporation worked with WSU to design and deploy a cloud-based ATAI community powered by Jive-n. This community helps industry partners retain social knowledge assets created during ATAI projects by empowering idea sharing amongst student employees, allowing them to tap into subject matter experts easily, and minimizing their reliance on email.

“We’re pleased to help WSU develop future generations of technologists and business leaders through collaborative partnerships with leading corporations,” said Colleen Jansen, vice president of global marketing at Jive Software. “Jive-n will increase ATAI’s efficiency and improve partner engagement and satisfaction, while exposing its students to the types of social intranet and employee engagement solutions they’ll find in modern business environments after graduation.”

In addition, Jive will provide training and curriculum for ATAI students to support the institute’s mission of preparing the next generation workforce for careers in the digital workplace. WSU is also looking to foster collaboration more broadly through a university-wide Jive-n community that will bring together distance learners, commuters and on-campus residents later this year. This will give all types of students and university stakeholders a virtual campus where they can connect with each other, follow specific people, groups or topics of interest, and publish blogs or other content via any device.

Wichita State University joins a long list of educational institutions that have launched Jive communities to boost student retention and completion rates. Organizations like Ashworth College, British Columbia Institute of Technology, Clinton Global Initiative University, Milwaukee School of Engineering, McGraw Hill, MIT Sloan School of Management, Northwestern University, Pearson, Penn Foster and University of Chicago Booth School of Business are using Jive products to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration between employees, faculty and students.

Material from a press release was used in this report.

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