This session presents the curriculum redesign approach to address the adult continuing ed learners' needs. We share our practice of revamping our traditional weekend/evening class programs into online, project-based curricula that emphasize both the development of 21st century skills and the profession-specific competencies of our students.
One of the major goals for continuing education is to prepare adult learners with the competency and skills needed for their job, career advancement, or other employment opportunities. We want to share our practices of revamping our traditional weekend/night class programs into online, project-based curricula that emphasize both the development of 21st century skills and the profession-specific competencies of our students.
We replaced many traditional weekend courses with online versions to provide adult learners with the flexibility and convenience of online learning, and let them take the advantage of extended time to interact with content, instructor, and peers. The exposure to the LMS and the uses of online tools helped the students develop the technical and computer skills that are much needed for their employment. Students develop professional competencies and skills by taking concentration courses, such as Mental Health Counseling, Youth Development and Leadership. In order to make the connection between the course work and professional skills, we relied extensively upon project-based learning activities. The students were encouraged to identify real-world problems or tasks that they would like to resolve or carry out when they graduate, as the projects for their courses. Toward the end of their study, the class projects can be easily incorporated into students’ competency portfolio, which will demonstrate the student’s skills and achievements. We embedded critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration skills in the evaluation criteria for the course projects. We also emphasized the student-driven process to develop learning experiences that enable our students to become empowered learners, digital citizens, knowledge constructors, innovative designers, computational thinkers, creative communicators, and successful collaborators.
We will present two examples of our re-designed project-based courses (Early Childhood Education and Development Concentration) to showcase how students select their projects, (peer and instructor) evaluation rubrics for each section of the projects, and how the final projects fit into the students’ career needs.
Relevance to the conference: This proposal shows our effective practice in online teaching and learning, especially the conversion from traditional weekend class to the online version. We will also present how the learning activities have been re-designed for online learners and how the instructors’ role has been changed to accommodate this strategic redesign.
Audience Appeal: This presentation is for instructors, instructional designers, and administrators who are interested in developing online or blended courses and activities for adult learners who are pursuing professional preparation degrees.
Interactivities: (1) The presenter will invite audience members to share their concerns/challenges with their professional preparation programs. By summarizing the concerns/challenges raised by the audience, the two challenges will be discussed in-depth by the presenter. (2) The audience will be invited to share their creative solutions to these complexities. The presenter will lead the audience to think about the project-based learning and the online learning as the solutions. And (3) the presenter will ask the audience to select from a list of design elements/strategies to use when redesigning an existing course into one that is project-based and competency-oriented. The presenter will show two examples of how our courses have been re-designed.