The following suggestions are centered around the theme of supporting your own academic and professional careers. How do we help you to meet and exceed expectations set by your universities through the value of University Alliances?
1. Teaching innovation. Hands-on software delivery in courses is still an innovative method that gets appropriate attention. This is because the learning effect of students has been measured in many studies to be substantially increased by such methods. You can also combine on-line exercises with team-building by provide students with collaboration tools and virtual meeting rooms parallel to the hands-on SAP experiences.
2. Corporate contacts. Networking is made easier through the contacts of this community, especially the SAP User Groups of customers and partners. There are dozens of contacts for each professor to meet who are local to them who are already participating in the SAP Community Network in the communities at the top of this page - SDN, BPX, BusinessObjects, EcoHub, and University Allicances. ASUG offers free membership to all UA member professors in the USA and Canada to join the largest user group in the world. The Australia User Group also invites your involvement. There are more examples worldwide.
3. Research projects.
a. Use the above contacts in #2 to line up survey, interview and case study participants.
b. Use SAP software in laboratory environments - you are licensed through University Alliances for academic purposes, not just classroom work.
c. combine a. and b. to test out a hypothesis in the lab with employees from a local firm.
d. keep reviewing our UA Stakeholders pages - we are making contacts with academic research groups within SAP - there may be a project listed that you can qualify to contribute to.
4. Accreditation support. If you look at the many courses that we support in different fields, you could create any number of interdisciplinary connections and assist your school to meet such accreditation requirements.
5. Advisory projects. Develop your own personal SAP (ERP, BI, CRM, IT, AIS, etc.) expertise by expanding and extending your familiarity with SAP software.
6. Financial grants. Substantial local, national, and ‘supra-national' (i.e. EU, ASEAN, etc.) government support grants are available almost everywhere in the world today when the research or teaching subject is building needed skills and qualifications which increase employment. It is not a directly applicable example, but Sunday's +Philadelphia Inquirer+ (Aug. 2, 2009) reported that Gloucester County College "is in the third year of a nearly $2 million federal grant to help develop a workforce for the more than 600 food-production firms in South Jersey." Similarly, you can almost certainly identify an SAP workforce employment gap in the hundreds or thousands surrounding the local corporate recruiting geography served by your university.
The above incomplete list of examples serves as the reasoning for my statements that our University Alliances community supports careers, and not only for students, but for professors and lecturers just as equally.
Bob
