WBL in Two-Year Colleges: What's in a Name?

Workplace-based learning provides participants with a valuable experiential learning opportunity to apply knowledge from the classroom to a real-world business or industry location. Yet despite calls to invest in or expand WBL opportunities in two-year institutions, no standard language or definitions appear to exist. Literature and research on WBL in two-year institutions is scant, and what is available suggests a lack of a common lexicon but does not address why it persists. This mixed-method study, using the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program as its sample, addresses this gap and provides further insight into WBL language. Study results confirm that the language used to define and describe different types of WBL lacks standardization; ATE projects use various terms for WBL opportunities, with no clear pattern of characteristics distinguishing among types of WBL. The choice of terms for particular types of WBL opportunities is driven not by the opportunities' goals and characteristics but by external factors. The response to whether language in WBL matters also varied across the study population. This article concludes by reviewing the potential implications of these findings for research and practice and suggesting what can be done now to capture the impacts of workplace-based learning.