Implementation

The student actually has the opportunity to submit a proposal, be it a field study or international trip. Actually, the student becomes part of the assessment plan and actually helps develop a plan of success for that experience outside of the classroom that really validates the learning, to the point now that we have businesses and nonprofits coming to us and saying, “Can you do this for us?” “Can you do that for us?” The community is engaged at the point right now that they have learned to really enjoy the contributions that students are making on the community.

(1) One of our classes is career experience. It’s something that’s taken in their fourth semester. They have a number of different options that they can select that meets their needs. One of them is an internship out in the community. Service learning is another aspect of that, where they can manage a project or work with a service organization and help them lead something, like a bowl for kids or something like that. They also have the opportunity to do study abroad. We have a number of study-abroad trips that are business focused, that go to spend two weeks in China or Ireland or Scotland or Brazil, Barcelona, a number of different locations, where they get some hands-on international learning as well. We’re always trying to build in that intentional hands-on experience for the students so they get some real-world experiences for their resume as well.

(2) We provide a lot of services out into our community. Last year we had 57,000 hours of authentic service learning. What we call authentic service learning is projects or service learning that is built right within the curriculum, so not just the extra project that a club did or we had a canned food drive or whatever. These are built right within the course. We’ve challenged all of our programs to include this. We’ve done everything from marketing plans for county economic development to event planning for different nonprofits and charities and all kinds of things in the health field with children and with adults. We’ve built things. We did all of the lighting and all of the trenching and all of the wiring in the reforestation camp. That’s where people go skiing now under the lights. We’re always looking for those kinds of opportunities, and they’re built right within the context of the program.

I got two favorite classes. One of them is math. It’s something that I love, and electricity, which is what I’m taking right now. My teachers, they made my classes so fun, playing in code and stuff like that. Now I’m working hands-on with my teacher, and we have a small group, which we have more fun cuz we can talk about it better than having a big group. It’s been pretty good for me. It’s been…This is what I dream, you know, about doing. I just love my classes.

My favorite course here is the general anatomy and physiology class. I like it because it’s something that I’m very interested in. It’s very true to life. It’s also very…for me, it’s really interesting. This past lab class we had cadavers, and we were naming the muscles and being able to really learn the insides of the body. Also, the instructor on Blackboard — she’s posted — every different type of modality, learning style is available on there. We have a LearnSmart book that we have assignments in, which is an interactive textbook. We have videos that we watch. We have different lectures that we watch, and we get to see the PowerPoints as well. She has different types of assignments on there that we can complete. She also makes a point to learn each one of our names and communicate with us during — and it’s a one-time-a-week class plus labs, so it’s a five-hour chunk of time, but it’s only once a week. But it still feels very close together. All of us feel like we are getting to know one another and support one another. That was also something else that the instructor suggested is that some of us exchange phone numbers in case we have quick questions. We share games. We did In Kahoots!, and we’ve also done Quizlet, so it’s just a really interesting class because it’s very varied.

For me, it’s all hands-on stuff. Because I honestly get bored sitting in a classroom. I’m like, I just can’t do it. So being like all hands on, we have all morning from 7:30 to 12:20 is all hands on. Then for two hours, we have an in-classroom, which isn’t too bad. But it more splits it up, and it’s just nice to have all the hands-on opportunities.