Active Learning in Online, Self-Paced Courses

With the growth of online education, questions pertaining to educational quality have arisen. How can faculty encourage engagement in an online course in which students may be separated geographically, even isolated? How can faculty promote an active learning environment that increases higher-order thinking and encourages students to play an active role in their education, particularly when student and teacher may never meet face to face? For Guided Individual Study (GIS), these questions are even more significant as students take courses at their own pace rather than in a semester-based format. Along with university faculty, Academic Outreach has explored these questions, seeking to enhance our curriculum through technological resources available for online coursework. In the 12 years since we have introduced online coursework to our distance learning portfolio, our faculty has learned lessons and adapted as the online world has changed. What began as print-based correspondence courses became online courses using the same content, but a different method of transmission. With evolving technology, online courses are now able to take advantage of multiple ways to transmit information, encourage interaction and engagement. Online courses are no longer identical to print-based courses, or even classroom-based courses, but have the benefit of communicating content in multiple formats. And given the self-paced nature of our courses, we have added elements to create a sense of community among dispersed students who are at different points in their coursework. Our poster will present elements of GIS courses that encourage interaction and higher-order thinking. We will discuss how, because of the self-paced nature of our program, we have adapted technology so that interaction is increased between students and between instructor and student. We will discuss how an online, self-paced format can encourage an active learning environment, challenging students to develop necessary skills not developed through traditional classroom courses.unpublishednot peer reviewe

Preparing Business Students for Participation in God’s Creative and Redemptive Purpose for the World

Institutions of higher education are under an increasing amount of pressure to prove that students can justify tuition payments in terms of monetary gain. Christian liberal arts colleges, however, have a much higher calling to prepare students for service to God’s kingdom. This paper describes recent efforts by one college to combine business education with vocational calling, shaping a curriculum and assessing its effectiveness in order to better prepare students for lives of faithfulness and service