A-HEC: One of the keys to success that you claim on your Web site is that Walden students are able to share their experiences with their peers. How are you able to build community and encourage experiential learning online?

PP: This point speaks to one of the underlying assumptions of a Walden education, which relates to our mission. We have a three-pronged mission. One objective is broad access to graduate education. The second is professional excellence. You can tell by the programs we offer that Walden serves professionals. And the third prong of our mission is social change. There are many ways that objective is implemented, but one of them is in our research model. Most of our learners come to us with an identified need to develop their research and scholarly skills in order to advance in their professions. We don’t get a lot of career changers or people who are going for that next promotion. Rather, we get people who are in the middle of their career and really want to advance and enrich their discipline. So ours is an applied research model and we actually build into every program the requirement that students apply what they are learning theoretically back into their professional and organizational settings.

Our learning model actually facilitates students doing that instrumentally during their programs. They don’t have to wait until they graduate in order to make those applications back into their professional settings. The basic learning model at the university really draws on the student experiences. We assume that students come well prepared and with expertise and as practitioners. To that foundation, we add the scholarship component.

Having said that, the online learning classroom is a very rich environment for building student community. And students do that within their classrooms. For example, in public health, you have classrooms filled with students from all over the United States, and in some instances, international students, who are working together on the same issues, but bringing with them very different sets of experiences from different regions throughout the world. And so they are able to share best practices and learn from each other.

We have upwards of 14,000 students in our College of Education, many of whom are teachers and educational leaders. They learn from each other in that way and they are able to share their professional practice while they’re actually learning the theory and take it back into their own practice on a kind of “learn it today, use it tomorrow” methodology.

Our doctoral students are required to participate in face-to-face residencies where we go around the country every month and offer different programs where they gather together. That’s a huge community-building event. We also do have a number of online tools that we offer to students quite outside their classrooms. Community-building list serves and Web sites are a couple of examples.

It won’t surprise you that working with 22,000 adult learners, they have a wide range of learning styles and preferences. There are a lot of students who don’t want to collaborate with their peers. They’re very independent learners. We have 35 years of experience serving adult learners and we know who they are and what they need and we try to meet them where they are, both in terms of their professional expertise, but also in terms of their learning styles. We encourage our students to respect those who don’t want to go online every day in an informal learning environment and chat up a storm. We provide the process, but we also offer enough leeway to accommodate the different learning styles.

Copyright 2006 Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness.