Educating Working Adults: Walden University President Jonathan Kaplan (Part 6)

SM: I am observing that you have a segment out there, which is teachers who are teaching middle school and high school math and science without significant math and science backgrounds. If you take that segment of teachers and teach them how to teach with technology, then you have a very interesting segment. That is important from a broad, scalable teaching point of view. America is falling behind in math and science.

JK: I would not disagree with that. We have a range of education technology specializations within our different programs that touch on what you are saying. We are in online education, so for us learning and technology go hand in hand. Another way to think about the use of technology in learning is to not think of technology as any sort of silver bullet. We actually make it a policy not to be cutting-edge. We focus on using technology to enable better learning. Not technology for technology’s sake, but just to enable better learning.

SM: How do you deliver your education? Are you using your own technology?

JK: We have a very basic LMS (learning management system) for our students. As adult learners, our students can get to the learning content quickly and do not have to spend too much time learning how to learn online [methods]. We try to make it simple. Another approach for us in terms of the use of technology with respect to teachers is that we launched a teacher preparation and teacher licensing program a few years ago. We bring in experts when we develop a new program. They are practitioners from the field. They know what programs are out there and what we could be doing better.

When we brought in those experts to help us with our teacher preparation and teacher licensing program, they told us that the field experience that new teachers went through was not optimal. These are people who have been out there and know how to manage classrooms. They told us that newly hired teachers were going out and observing other teachers as a part of their field experience and were not necessarily learning best practices.

That was not a practice specifically tied to Walden but what teachers across America experienced in general. Since we offer so many programs to teachers, we were able to recognize what that challenge must be for new teachers, and we wanted to make sure that those who use our program are as prepared as possible when they enter the teaching profession.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Educating Working Adults: Walden University President Jonathan Kaplan
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