Cooperative education is a form of education in which students divide their educational time between classroom and workplace learning. This can be done from semester to semester, with one semester spent in classes, the next on the job, and so on until the student completes his or her program. Instead, some programs divide a student’s day between the classroom and the workplace. Cooperative education, which is commonly used in technical educational programs, is primarily concerned with the relationship between what is learned and how that knowledge can be applied in the “real world.”
Cooperative education, first proposed and developed Herman Schneider in the early twentieth century, aims to motivate students to learn directly connecting what they learn to how it can be applied in the workplace. A cooperative education pairs a student at a secondary level, such as college or university, with a real work environment. It is often associated with experiential learning and similar educational pedagogies. Someone interested in computer science, for example, might spend one semester learning about microchips and circuit board design. He or she would then work at a company that made microchips and circuit boards the following semester.
In some types of cooperative education, the student in the preceding example would learn during one part of the day and work during another. As a result, he or she may learn something in the morning and then apply it in the afternoon or evening while working. This enables a student to immediately connect classroom material with how it relates to the industry in which he or she wishes to work. This link is frequently aided instructors who serve primarily as facilitators, assisting students in reflecting on their work and how it relates to classroom lessons.
Some critics of cooperative education see flaws in these programs, claiming that they take a long time to complete and that the student may not make the proper connection between the classroom and the workplace. However, as technology has become more important in a variety of industries, this type of education is increasingly seen as an ideal way to teach newcomers to a field as well as to facilitate ongoing education for those already employed in that field. Other pedagogical movements, such as service learning and experiential education, have frequently borrowed ideas from cooperative education, and one of these models may well be the future of American technological education.