Regional Cultivation Fund: Workforce Development

The Regional Cultivation Fund has created the opportunity to build key partnerships even as it has served high priority regional needs. WHIN’s eLearning program, which has been extended until August 31, 2023, has greatly strengthened WHIN’s ability to serve its workforce development mission while giving us powerful connections with the K-12 school corporations that serve the 10-county region.

If the WHIN region is to distinguish itself as a global epicenter of IoT, it must have a workforce that is exceptionally fluent and capable online. Students who graduate high school without digital fluency and strong skills are already behind, and neither they nor the region can afford that deficit.

Thanks to the RCF and funding partner North Central Health Services, WHIN has made it possible for more K-12 classrooms to be equipped for digital and remote learning, for more students to be connected to online learning platforms from anywhere, and for more student activities to move into the digital world.

WHIN is now a recognized friend of the region’s K-12 schools. This is enabling us to continue to find other ways to help to build foundations for the digitally-capable workforce. For example, with additional investment from Lumina Foundation, WHIN is working with SkyePack to develop a series of supplementary courses in IoT for high school students.

The first product, called “Will You Yield?,” is a mix of classroom and on-line modules within a game platform in which students make decisions about how to farm crops—with and without technology—while having to deal with roll-of-the-dice conditions, such as weather. Starting this spring, the course will be piloted in three of the high schools in the region.

We have also installed more online weather stations on K-12 campuses to be used in a variety of STEM curricula.?

Learn more about eLearning: whin.org/grants/e-learning