Additive Credit for Coop

The Proposal

It is proposed that each coop semester taken by a student at SFU be granted three non-academic (`additive') credits.

Rationale

Education comes from two roots. The traditional root is that of apprenticeship: the student acquires the know-how of his or her profession through working closely with an experienced practitioner. For many disciplines practiced at SFU, it is only relatively recently -- since the early years of the twentieth century -- that the demand for increased numbers of practitioners has led to the creation of a second root, the academic tradition. For all disciplines, there are important aspects of education best mastered in the traditional manner. This is most true of those skills that are hardest to formalise -- teamwork, craftsmanship, and professionalism. Conveying the importance of these skills to the student is a challenge, not least because our society in general, and academia in particular, values intellectual skills and discounts those abilities which cannot easily be formalised and tested.

To meet the challenge of putting a proper value on applied skills, we propose to recognise time spent in acquiring them by granting additive credit for Coop semesters. These credits would supplement, rather than replace, the academic credits required by SFU for graduation. Coop semesters would be graded as Pass/Fail.

The primary advantage of this proposal is that it would emphasise to students that we consider coop an important part of the educational experience. However,it has the secondary advantage that it would bring us into line with other major universities offering Coop in Canada, most of which allocate Coop credit in exactly this way. This would remedy a problem that has been compromising the quality of education at SFU: if we were to follow the practice of other Canadian universities and include Coop credits in our FTE totals, our University would no longer be obliged to take in additional students to meet the shortfall created by failing to count these FTE's. This would allow us to meet enrollment targets while maintaining higher admission requirements, thus raising academic standards across the University, reducing class sizes, and alleviating the problem of course unavailability. Lastly, we note that a short-term benefit of these changes would be an automatic increase in the number of FTE's that could be counted towards DTO targets.

When this issue has previously been discussed by SCUS, concerns have arisen under two heads:

Quality Control

What mechanisms are in place to ensure that students have actually learned something from their Coop experience?

Additive credit should only be granted to programs where effective mechanisms for ensuring this are in place. We believe that such mechanisms are already in place for most units, and can readily be implemented in the remainder. Quality is ensured, firstly, by SFU's Coop program, which is accredited by the Canadian Association for Cooperative Education, and which, to maintain its accreditation, must demonstrate that each Coop work term provides students with the opportunity to learn through the application of academic principles in a work context and through exposure to new ideas and processes experienced in the workplace.

In many academic units, faculty and staff members are also actively involved in the assessment of the Coop students' experience. For example, each returning student may be required to give an oral presentation on his or her work experience to an audience of Coop staff member(s) and faculty volunteer(s), and submit a written work report that will be read by Coop staff and by a faculty member. It is recommended that similar practices be put in place, so that faculty or teaching assistants will evaluate each written work report. The Vice-President Academic has committed to providing funds to academic units to support the hiring of graduate students to perform these evaluations. (Calculation shows that if each work report takes an hour to evaluate, the total cost of this exercise for the entire University would be less than $10,000 per annum.)

To further ensure the quality of the work experience, the Coop staff must endeavour to create employment opportunities which enhance the academic disciplines of the students. The acting Director of Coop has agreed that co-op staff in FASS will work with the departments to identify jobs that will closely align a work term with the student's discipline, and will then try to generate these types of jobs in the greater community.