Successes and lessons from a trial of the three-way university-enterprise cooperation program on data science and big data processing technology in China

Gaifang Dong; Gaifang Dong

doi:10.3934/steme.2022018

STEM Education

2022, Volume 2, Issue 4: 293-302. doi: 10.3934/steme.2022018

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Successes and lessons from a trial of the three-way university-enterprise cooperation program on data science and big data processing technology in China

Gaifang Dong ^,

College of Computer and Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot, China; donggf@imau.edu.cn (G.D.)

Academic Editor: Stephen Xu

Received: 02 October 2022 Accepted: 02 November 2022 Published: 07 January 2023

Work integrated learning (WIL), most in the form of co-operative (co-op) partnerships or workplace placements/internships, has been incorporated into many undergraduate programs in universities around the world. In this express report, we share a recent trial of a new WIL model for a bachelor's IT degree in data science and big data processing technology experimented at our University (Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, IMAU) in China. This new model involves three entities, an institution as IMAU (Part A), an industry-certification training agency (Part B), and a cloud computing enterprise (Part C). Our experiment was initiated in September 2018 with the first intake of about 120 undergraduate students and completed in July 2022 over four years of full-time study. The initial results show that the three-way WIL initiative produced more than 60 employment-ready and industry-certified professionals for ICT enterprises and service providers specialized in data science and big data processing technology. The industry-standard certification training and the four-month industry placement in a top 500 ICT enterprise in the world significantly improved both the hands-on skills required by the ICT industry and the employment opportunities for the graduates.
Citation: Gaifang Dong. Successes and lessons from a trial of the three-way university-enterprise cooperation program on data science and big data processing technology in China[J]. STEM Education, 2022, 2(4): 293-302. doi: 10.3934/steme.2022018

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Abstract

Work integrated learning (WIL), most in the form of co-operative (co-op) partnerships or workplace placements/internships, has been incorporated into many undergraduate programs in universities around the world. In this express report, we share a recent trial of a new WIL model for a bachelor's IT degree in data science and big data processing technology experimented at our University (Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, IMAU) in China. This new model involves three entities, an institution as IMAU (Part A), an industry-certification training agency (Part B), and a cloud computing enterprise (Part C). Our experiment was initiated in September 2018 with the first intake of about 120 undergraduate students and completed in July 2022 over four years of full-time study. The initial results show that the three-way WIL initiative produced more than 60 employment-ready and industry-certified professionals for ICT enterprises and service providers specialized in data science and big data processing technology. The industry-standard certification training and the four-month industry placement in a top 500 ICT enterprise in the world significantly improved both the hands-on skills required by the ICT industry and the employment opportunities for the graduates.

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Author's biography
Dr. Gaifang Dong is an associate professor in College of Computer and Engineering at Inner Mongolia Agricultural University (IMAU) in China. She is specialized in classification of protein sequences using machine learning and deep learning methods, and design and parallelization of biological gene sequence splicing and multiple sequence alignment algorithms based on Center-Star multiple sequence alignment in MapReduce and Spark. She also researches swarm intelligence algorithm for combination optimization problems

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