Achieving Industry-aligned Education through Digital-Commons: A Case Study

ABSTRACT

Aligning student skills with industry practices in the current fast-changing digital economy is one of the many challenges faced by higher education institutions. In this paper, we present a novel approach in which we developed a digital commons to serve as a bridge between emerging industry practices and academic curricula. In a digital commons, knowledge is created and shared online. This case study describes the motivation for, and the design, development and evaluation of, an industry practice digital commons (IPDC) to assist students in developing industry relevant knowledge. The target students were pursuing a course on IT Governance and Service Management (IGSM) at an Australian university. The development of the digital artifact followed the design science research (DSR) paradigm. Feedback from 78 students and 26 practitioners, and the visitor analytics totaling 122,360 users, indicated that both student and practitioner communities considered the IPDC to be valuable.

KEYWORDS:

• Employability
• industry-aligned education
• digital commons
• connectivism learning theory
• knowledge commons theory
• design science research (DSR)
• case study

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Professor Patrick Danaher in reviewing the manuscript and providing valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).