
Students in the Raymond A. Mason School of Business at William & Mary are once again forging a path in technology education.
The college recently announced it would be offering a 14-hour course called “Introduction to [Robotic Process Automation] for Business” starting in fall 2020 in partnership with the company UiPath, according to a news release from Version 2.0 Communications which represents the company.
UiPath is a technology company that started the Academic Alliance program to help educate students in RPA technology.
“Since RPA is new technology over the past few years, there is a huge skills gap in the industry,” said Tom Clancy, senior vice president of UiPath Learning. “We believe that over 100 million people need to be skilled-up in order to address this need.”
UiPath also offers its UiPath Academy which are entirely free online courses people can take to learn about the technology. Academic Alliance is an initiative to get education into students at universities across the globe. Clancy said when the program started last year, there was only one college partnered with the company and now there are more than 400 international institutions of higher education.
The program at William & Mary, “Robot for Every Student,” was created with the idea of having students in the business school to learn how to apply this technology to their everyday lives.
“Whether something is a fad or a structural change, students have to be conversant with those things in the workplace,” said Kurt Carlson, associate dean for faculty and academic affairs at the Mason School of Business. “They have to enter into conversations that are happening right now…because we are trying to connect business school students to opportunities as they exist in the world right now.”
The way RPA technology works, Clancy said, is by having almost like a duplicate of a person working in the background. As the technology progresses, it will be designed to run programs, administer tasks and do research that is specific to the person’s needs.
“You can think of RPA as a personal assistant that can essentially duplicate your digital activities,” Carlson said. “You might have several and they never get tired and make fewer mistakes. You can curate information you wouldn’t otherwise be able to, organize data and more.”
Carlson said UiPath funded the “Robot for Every Student” program, which is offered to 400 students, and means taking the software and simply attaching it to a student’s computer.
While the program currently is offered only to students in the business school, both Carlson and Clancy said they want to see it grow in other programs throughout the college as the technology takes off.
“Certainly even for a history student, they can use it in everyday life,” Carlson said. “I wouldn’t put it past the creative and highly intelligent students we have here to figure out how to use it in all of their courses.”
For now, the 14-hour course for students is designed to focus on three different aspects. First, looking at how to gather the data into a wide set of sources, then taking that data and transforming the data into something with meaning. Finally, Carlson said, they will learn that rather than going out broadly and curating from many places, they can measure the same thing over time and produce a trend of it.
Before taking the course, 140 students participated in an introductory session in September and others who could not attend were encouraged to take a five-hour course online. Carlson said this helps provide students with zero background a sense of foundation and is a refresher for those who might already know a bit about the technology.
Carlson said the college wants to produce students who not only understand the current technology but can start predicting and preparing for future uses.
“What we are asking them to do as a project is not program a bot,” he said. “But instead, see where the program will be in 18 months and conceive of a process that is new to the world that doesn’t currently exist.”