I am currently involved in a large project exploring a potential new slate of hybrid offerings that would expand our learner population beyond undergraduate and graduate students. One of the areas under consideration would involve targeted short courses for professional engineers needing to develop skills for a rapidly changing world in areas like robotics, smart manufacturing, and energy conversion. The idea here is that in many cases technologies and methods have outpaced what many engineers in the workplace received in terms of their formal education. A second specific area being explored would target high school graduates and people with less than 4-year degrees in need of re-skilling and up-skilling in order to enable employability in terms of proficiency with newer manufacturing and other engineering technologies.
For both of these potential audiences, a natural early step has been to ask employers involved in hiring and managing which specific topics they would like to see us offer. And, for both potential learner audiences the idea is that these knowledge gaps can be augmented by the expertise of faculty doing advanced work in these areas
And, as it so often does in online learning discussions, efficiency needs lead to conversations about how we might quickly re-package existing materials for either audience: working professional engineers and those possibly under- or un-employed in need of re-skilling and up-skilling. This makes a lot of sense in theory, after all the science and technology don’t change depending on who you are teaching.
This approach rarely works in practice, though, because at the end of the day, while we think we are teaching content, we are ultimately teaching people. And, because people bring their whole selves to their learning, we need to target our instruction to the learners’ whole selves.
This includes exploring questions like:
- Have these students ever learned online? Will they know how to navigate a learning management system?
- What type of supports will they need to be successful in these largely self-directed online environments?
- What types of access will they have to the hardware (e.g., laptops, smartphones) and software necessary to participate in this education?
- What examples are most likely to resonate and keep them engaged with potential difficult materials?
- And, so on…
Fortunately, there are things we already know. For example, traditionally underserved learners typically need more, not less, active support when it comes to learning online. We also know that people learn best when they can connect what they are learning to the real world, more importantly, to their real world. This puts the burden on the instructors and instructional designers to make those connections explicit for the students. But how can we do this if we don’t really understand our student audiences?
This is why I think it is crucial that in addition to polling employers about their needs, we need to be working with our potential learners to discover more about their experiences — professional, personal, and educational — so that we make sure that whatever we offer them is ultimately successful.