Course Development: The Long and Winding Road

New courses begin with a good idea and then jump onto the long and winding road to success or fall into the file of failure. The course described took three detours before arriving at the final destination. Road Sign One: Learning Experience with Academic Partnerships (LEAP) service-learning course allowed undergraduate students to work eight hours per week in a community health agency and attend a classroom discussion every other week for debriefing. After three years the interest in undergraduates waned as the community partners became overwhelmed with competing demands, budget cuts and staff shortages. Road Sign Two: The course was repurposed into an experiential research campus-based course which allowed students to collect and analyze data collected on campus. After two semesters, it was clear that students lacked sufficient content in the research to achieve the learning objectives. Road Sign Three: After discussion among two instructors, it was determined that the online Foundations of Evaluation and Research (FER) course needed experiential learning and the service-learning course needed more research content. Presto! A classroom lab was added to the online FER solving problems in both courses. Now students apply the online FER content to the experiential classroom learning lab to research real on-campus issues. Designation: Students are required to register for the paired courses, so knowledge and application are achieved simultaneously.