Abstract

Nowadays, higher education institutions around the world educating their students to be work ready. One of the ways they do it by implementing Work Integrated Learning (WIL) into the curriculum. WIL has been part of many health sciences, such as medicine, nursing and engineering education but it was hardly considered important by statistics educators. The expectation until recently was statistics students will be able to do what is required of them in the workplace when they start working.

Anyone who worked as a statistical consulting remembers their first consulting job and how different it was from their theoretical learning. For example, the real data is almost never clean and ready for analysis and communication is very important especially communicating with non-statisticians. If so, what can we do as educators to help our students transition from learning to work ready graduates?

Project work activities and assessments where students are provided with mentoring and feedback at each step of their work is the solution we chose to implement in our third year undergraduate and a master unit. We designed the activities in a way that our students were our apprentices where they begin their journey on becoming experts in a safe learning environment.

In this presentation, we will demonstrate different ways of mentoring students in an undergraduate work integrated learning unit where the real industry problems are presented by industry partners and a postgraduate unit where students identify their own research questions (problems) from a set of given data sets. Where possible, we will share student work to support the value of mentorship and how we designed the activities by utilising the Aboriginal 8 ways of learning pedagogy.