Second Careers

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Lessons Learned

Jo Ann Dauzat, Ed.D.
Dean and Professor
College of Education
  		• There is a great interest among retiring or career changing adults in becoming secondary teachers.
  		• There is strong interest by qualified non-traditional students in securing a "convenient and effective" medium for accessing courses leading to teacher certification.
  		• It is possible to design and implement high quality online courses for teacher certification. Our SCIT experiences as faculty, administrators, and students removed our doubts about equivalency of quality with site-based courses.
  		• Faculty offering online courses invest significant time in interactions with students, frequently more than if the courses met face-to-face. Online courses are labor intensive for faculty.
  		• Online courses encourage high levels of student-student and student-faculty participation and engagement. This medium accommodates interaction among all students and seems to be especially compelling for those who are reluctant to engage in a site-based setting.
  		• Students provide high ratings of instructional quality for online courses. Faculty concerns for lowering their student evaluations of their courses were proved unfounded.
  		• Students express genuine appreciation for opportunities to pursue courses online. Many potential students reside and work in rural areas significant distances from any institution of higher education. We had requests from numerous students to enroll in the SCIT courses because of the convenience and lack of travel time and expense. In several of the courses, we had to limit enrollment to alternative certification students in dispersed geographic regions, as well as our military personnel.
  		• Online instruction is an effective medium for high quality learning by non-traditional students. Our faculty had concerns about the quality of the learning in online offerings, especially since our institution will be held accountable for the performance of our program completers. The SCIT project allayed our fears. We are ready to utilize online courses for teacher preparation candidates in a more widespread fashion because of our positive SCIT experiences.