BEST PRACTICE LEARNING THROUGH UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY COLLABORATION IN THE ASIAN GAMES 2018

Abstract

The 2018 Asian Games were held in Indonesia from August to September as a mega sports event for Asian countries. The games were an opportunity for universities which offer an ‘event management program’ to collaborate with the organizing committee to provide learning opportunities for students and faculty lecturers. This paper illustrates how Universitas Prasetiya Mulya`s collaboration was organized with the INASGOC committee during the 2018 Asian Games. The author acted as a collaborator with the committee by negotiating student volunteering opportunities as well as becoming a volunteer herself during the opening and closing ceremonies. To explore and find the effectiveness of this collaboration research was conducted using self-evaluation questionnaires and followed by a leaderless group discussion with former students who participated in the collaboration to receive their feedback on the benefits and challenges of taking part in the collaboration as volunteers. All data were analyzed by using a descriptive qualitative method. The research identified a number of benefits and challenges of such university-industry collaborations. Students benefitted from working on a prestigious international event where team working with volunteers from other countries helped to develop their cross-cultural capability skills. One significant challenge that was encountered was maintaining contact and communication with supervisors from INASGOC before and during the collaboration – as some were temporary employees themselves. This posed problems for the students who at times needed clear instructions on what their tasks should be. A novel aspect of this paper is that it evaluates the learning that can be gained for student volunteers at a mega sports event that is only staged every four years.

Keywords: university-industry collaboration, event management, sports event, Asian Games