CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES FOR CREATING REAL WORLD APPLICATIONS IN ONLINE ENVIRONMENTS

Many educators and course designers strive to mean the intent of learning objectives in today’s online courses and become too entangled with meeting the educational needs “just in time.” However, the purpose of this presentation will be to demonstrate how any type of educational institution, especially with virtual courses, can go beyond the “just in time” approach and provide real world applications that will provide more “vigor and meaningful connections” for lifelong learning. Knowles (1980) noted that “adult [learners] see education as a process of developing increased competence to achieve their full potential in life. They want to be able to apply whatever knowledge and skill they gain today to life more effective tomorrow.” This raises the question of whether or not Academics are offering enough enriching and meaning learning opportunities to help satisfy the needs, as well as wants of today’s adult learner, as well as meeting the growing workforce needs of society’s business needs.

The main focus of this presentation will be to examine how one virtual university has addressed the learning needs of today’s working adults, provided additional skills training for workforce needs, and enabled adult learners with skills and training to prepare for lifelong learning events and career plans. The main focus of this presentation will focus on how one virtual university has implemented the use of technology to help students go beyond basic internet research, but to perform research with meaningful application and results for their academic and potential career endeavors. The course is based on how Human Resource Managers prepare Ex-Patriates for overseas jobs. Typically, this course is taught with a text and a series of reports on various topics. However, the course was updated with an Internet project for students to create as they learned more about what an Ex-Patriate needs to know before, during, and after an overseas assignment. For a student who has not traveled abroad before, the course can be a challenge, but the online learning environment has enabled more students to use technology to interact, create, and implement more meaningful work projects in the virtual classroom. Their final Ex-Patriate project can be shared with future employers as evidence of their academic work. Finally, this presentation will focus on how academics, practitioners, and adult learners can benefit from the use of online technology and how they can create academic and career development opportunities and learning events. Learning should be an on-going process, and the use of virtual learning can help create and implement more improved and more interactive learning opportunities for adult learners.