аIJʹÙÍø

As a Senior Lecturer and a qualified actuary, my specialisation is teaching actuarial courses in the School of Risk and Actuarial Studies at аIJʹÙÍø Business School. 

I have background on deep reinforcement learning, so I am particularly interested in the technology side of actuarial studies. Because of that, I helped to develop Quantitative Business Analytics in a new course that I now deliver.

This final year synthesis course has the clear objective to empower students to analyse complex business problems and make better and faster decisions using modern analytical tools and quantitative techniques. From the very beginning, we ran it as a Sandbox Course.

My aim in incorporating аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox into my own course was to provide real-world industry experience for final-year students. For example, an important career skill for my students is the ability to work in teams. I thought the аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox Program would be a way to strengthen this aspect of teamwork, as in the real world, a lot of work must be done in teams. For example, building models during the pricing report. There is no way that one person is doing that.

For me, the main criteria for a successful implementation of the аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox Program would be giving students more experience of the industry side, and not just using textbook data. I wanted to teach them that there is no right or wrong answer to any industry problem. What is more important is the way you are thinking, how you analyse problems, and realising that there is no one correct answer to these challenges.

Before I ran a Sandbox Course, I had combined other forms of work-integrated learning with academic learning for my students in other courses. I leveraged mine and my colleagues' industry connections to work directly with industry mentors. There would be around 10 industry mentors for every 20 students. Each student would work on different projects over two terms. Students define and research the problem they want to fix in Term 1, and in Term 2 students continue to work directly with their mentors to deliver demand solutions or author reports.

The аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox Course works differently in that each student team works on a single, shared challenge over the period. We also engage with companies rather than individuals. In this way, the аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox format was more scalable in comparison to the conventional work-integrated learning method. This is because, in part, the аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox program is less dependent on individual mentors than the previous model. 

For example, in this previous model, one mentor might be very engaged, one might have significantly less or more experience, and another might lose contact with us over the term – which means students might be getting different experience and support. This makes it hard to measure the difference in the students’ learning experience and provide them with a positive outcome.

Ensuring a large and engaged pool of mentors is critical when it comes to the model of work-integrated learning we engaged in before moving on to a Sandbox Course. This is particularly vital as the student cohort expands. In this previous model, a focus on continuously refining matching processes and strengthening support systems is required to maintain and enhance these important and beneficial industry partnerships. This process requires a lot of energy and time.

An additional challenge with this previous model was that it could be hard to benchmark the student experience with the issue of topic choice, as well as the varying mentor-student experiences. I would have to consider if the project was performing well because the subject was better. Or was it because the mentor was better? Or does a project appear inferior because they chose to tackle a more complicated problem? It was extremely hard to measure that.

This was particularly an issue in accreditation classes, where the final exam has extremely high weighting, and there is a cut-off of 65% to be accepted into the Actuary Institute. This final exam has a major impact on their career, and students get anxious. As a result, we had to give all the students similar grades for the industry project and rely more on the final exam for marks, to assess them all fairly.

I believe that this previous work-integrated learning model can work if you have a smaller class (for example, 20 students). That way you could tailor the problem to the student’s interest. But when the course grows to, say, 100 students, this approach is not sustainable.

In comparison, a Sandbox Course sees students working on the same challenge, meaning establishing the benchmarks of quality is easier. It is more representative of all the students, both in terms of the mentors and working on a single challenge. In this regard, the аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox Program gives the academic and industry partners a baseline from which to provide feedback and assess different teams fairly.

This means - when it is not an accreditation course - we can run the Sandbox Course with a higher project weighting. We can put a lot more weight on the assignments and discussions, which are more integrated with the Sandbox challenges that the students are solving.

While I already have industry experience and have run courses with work-integrated learning before, using the Sandbox model provided me with a much-needed structure that allowed me to maximise student success and motivation.

Of course, there are challenges too – for example, how can we best support English as a Second Language (ESL) students. When there is a group assignment, the workload might not be equally shared. To address this, we need to consider the factors such as a feeling of belonging and diversity of the student cohort, and what a Sandbox Course might look like to different students. We should provide a baseline opportunity for everyone to be exposed to the industry.

Overall, I would deem the аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox Course I ran as more successful as my other work-integrated learning experiences. The student feedback has been great in the course evaluations. I have had companies come back to me and ask for recommendations of students who they can bring on as interns, which is a big highlight for me in terms of student employment outcomes and motivation. In this way, the аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox Program really stands out.

I now have more industry connections, and I can go beyond in introducing students to industry as part of their education. For colleagues who have worked mostly on the academic side, and have limited industry experience, I would highly recommend the аIJʹÙÍø Sandbox Program as a good window for you to increase your industry experience.