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A variety of structural problems prevent an optimum flow of students
through this workforce pipeline – adversely affecting the college’s
responsiveness to community need. These problems affect program
efficiency and student quality. The most significant problems are:
Course Based Learning Structures The
fundamental unit of student learning is the course, which assesses
student competencies in the aggregate. As a result, it is difficult
to guarantee student competence for each competency upon course
completion. In addition, course competencies tend to be concentrated
on professional requirements and tend to be inadequate in addressing
learning skills, the affective domain, and collateral workplace/student
skills. In effect, traditional assessment of student learning occurs
at the tree level, overlooking the leaves and branches that make
up a tree.
Program Structures At present, articulation
of the student learning experience between the four educational levels
are weak at best. Even at the program level, with a broader range
of learning support services, there is a need to better integrate
the student learning experience between courses. In this case, because
the student learning experience is concentrated upon individual trees,
a vision of the forest is sometimes lacking.
Learning Relationships Educational
institutions often perceive themselves as providers of knowledge
rather than facilitators of learning, which tends to establish teacher
– learner, knowledge bearer and knowledge receiver relationships.
Although curricular and instructional structures are efficient and
useful ways of guiding the learning relationship, they often overlook
the fact that learning can and does occur outside of the classroom,
and often times without the presence of a teacher. Returning to
the forest metaphor, trees do have an ability to grow without gardeners
always present.
To more effectively meet the state’s workforce requirements in
health care, the college will need to focus its learning support
services effort to more effectively address the structural flaws
within its programs.
The Vision
Resource constraints at the college prevent traditional learning
support methods from being scaled upwards. Development of online
learning support services provide an alternative method of service
delivery. It is suggested however, that to be effective, these support
services need to be developed strategically and targeted at the
structural flaws of traditional education.
The vision being proposed is not a technological solution, but
rather an organizational strategy for delivering learning assistance
at the program level.
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Competency Based Learning Structures
Focus on specific competencies found within the course to insure
that critical competencies are developed among students. Online
tutorials capable of assessing, remediating, and tracking student
performance are ideal for this.
Areas of initial development by the college are tutorials designed
to 1) perform work skills assessment, skills development, and tracking
and 2) applied competencies not adequately addressed by prerequisite
courses (health related math skills and emphasis on anatomy topics
not adequately covered by introductory math/anatomy and physiology
courses).
Program Based Communities An online
community is perceived as essential for the delivery of online learning
support services. The concept of a program based online community
implies a mechanism through which communications can occur between
students, faculty, advisors, and the public who are in some manner
tied to a particular academic program.
The purpose of the community is to provide a thread that connects
and creates learning experiences at the program level – above the
course level. Initial efforts at the college will use the program
based community to: 1) inform (program specific calendar or bulletin),
2) to manage program level learning experiences (program level coordination
of service learning), 3) to provide learning assistance (peer tutoring/mentoring),
and 4) to permit random/personal communications between students
to foster student community building (bulletin board/email).
Multiple Learning Relationships Due
to resource constraints, the scalability of online learning support
services can only be achieved through automation (tutorials) or
student involvement and management of community activities.
Summary
An academic program based approach has been adopted for the development
of online learning support services. The desired outcome of these
activities are measurable gains in the efficiency of the educational
pipeline in producing quality health care workers.
This is to be achieved by developing micro competency based and
macro community based learning structures designed to overcome structural
weaknesses in the course based learning structure. These services
are expected to be available 24/7, scalable across all educational
levels from the high school to the workplace, and measurably provide
a return on the investment involved. Technology requirements are
affordable and available to most institutions when implemented in
their simplest form.
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