IT experiential learning: The Living Lab

In today\´s competitive job market, businesses will hire people with the relevant work experience, which creates quite a challenge for graduating students. Thus, graduating students also need experience to go with their degrees in order to be competitive in current job market. To better prepare our students, the Computer Information Technology program developed an experiential learning program called the "Living Lab". The Living Lab provides real world experience in all aspects of information technology to students by assigning various projects in a real work environment. This allows students to apply their classroom learning and develop the skills and experience needed to prepare them for today\´s competitive job market, which is the mission of the Living Lab. Just like the name, the Living Lab experiences remain ever evolving and complicated; thus, finding ways to effectively assess learning persists as a challenge. In this paper, we will show how the Living Lab evolved and the organization, management, and assessment tools used in order to provide students the best experience to assist in their obtaining jobs. Further discussions will show our findings and the innovative ways the lab evolved to take into account the blending of processes, business practices, and academic rigor.