A Closer Look

One of the ways that many higher education institutions are responding to the call for more efficient and cost effective education is known as Competency Based Education (CBE). Many of the one million college graduates CBE-image1needed are adults with substantial on-the-job experience. The structure of CBE programs varies from school to school. For the most part, CBE programs are vehicles through which experienced learners can demonstrate and document the fact that through their prior experience they already possess a high degree of competency in the learning objectives stated in an academic course.

A wise teacher once said, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink no more than you can lead a student to knowledge and make him think.” Motivating students is one of the great challenges any teacher faces in any educational environment whether online or in the classroom. In this article, we will explore five keys to unlocking an adult student’s motivation to learn. Those keys are expertise, empathy, enthusiasm, clarity and cultural responsiveness. ¹ This article will explore empathy.

So what can be done to foster a culture that promotes academic integrity? Following are a few suggestions here from Dr. Mac Adkins.

Remember the good old days when your team got to go to conferences in cool locations? (I don't either.)

Would you like to attend a virtual conference but are afraid that you would miss the camaraderie of a face-to-face (F2F) conference? Are you secretly curious about virtual conferences but feel like they just don’t count because they are…well, virtual?

Have you attended a virtual conference that just felt like a long Webinar with talking heads? Attending a virtual conference is much like attending a F2F conference but without the headaches of traveling.

Virtual learning environments will be just as beneficial for adults as they are for kids. In fact, there’s a good chance that nearly every adult will engage in some sort of virtual education in the next fifteen years. I’m not talking about virtual higher education or continuing education courses, as awesome as those will be. Instead, I’m talking about training and how something that is often the bane of our professional lives might soon be one of its most exciting aspects.