Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies offers rigorous design online courses that provide rich representation of knowledge-in-practice. In this session, we will share with the audience how we work with experienced working professionals to incorporate rich real-world experiences into online courses to engage students and prepare them for the workforce.
Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies offers rigorously designed online courses that provide rich representation of knowledge-in-practice.
Malcolm Knowles (1984) stated that “adults are most interested in learning subjects that have immediate relevance and impact to their job or personal life.” Many of our graduate students are working adults who manage full-time jobs along with their courses. They lead very busy lives and take courses to either pursue a career change or advance their current career. The biggest challenge for us is engaging those students and helping them maintain their motivation in asynchronous online courses throughout a given semester. We address those challenges by adhering to a systematic instructional design process and purposefully design authentic learning activities which help students connect theory and practice. Authentic learning activities also help students connect what they learn in class to real-world issues, problems and applications. We incorporate authentic learning into the design of online courses in many different ways:
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Invite experts working in related fields to share their experiences and new trends with the students. We film expert interviews in the studio, via Zoom, or both depending on the location of the guest experts.
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Use authentic tasks for online discussions and projects. We simulate real-world situations to have students face the challenge of the complexity of real life and construct their own responses. The authentic tasks can be online discussions, role play, group project, etc.
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Assess students by having them produce items that closely resemble what will be expected of them in a professional setting.
In this session, we will share with the audience how we prepare and film guest expert interviews for our online courses and how we work with subject matter experts to incorporate authentic tasks into our online courses. Our ultimate goal is to make learning more meaningful to our students and prepare them to make an immediate impact in the workplace and excel within industry. In the end, we will demonstrate some expert interviews and show examples of role play activities, group projects, asynchronous online discussions, and other authentic assessments. We will also discuss challenges faced when attempting to implement these sorts of activities and assessments into online courses.
This session will be interactive. We will engage the audience to share with us the strategies they use to engage online students and answer any questions they may have. Participants will walk away with ideas for immersing their online students in rich real-world experience.
References
Knowles, M. (1984). Andragogy in action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.