With the increase of online learning in higher education, the opportunity and demand for online service-learning courses are also increasing. Online service-learning can create conditions for students to learn professional and civic skills such as effectively working across a continuum of face-to-face and online environments, as Endersby and colleagues (2017) call the continuum of virtuality, or developing digital student leadership skills (Ahlquist, 2017).
In this blog, we share two approaches to course design for the asynchronous environment: one with a faculty-identified partnership and the other with student-identified partnerships. Although the logistics of online service-learning may look different than on-campus sections, they can be equally valuable and viable.
The basics such as the components of service-learning or the categories of learning goals remain the same (revisit What is Service-Learning? in this blog series). We conclude with a list of considerations for designing and implementing online service-learning.
English course at Kansas State University
In an online, asynchronous section of Written Communication for the Workplace, Ania’s students collaborated on a writing project with the Manhattan Area Habitat for Humanity. Habitat wanted to share its community work through online storytelling, so Ania and the Development Manager designed a project where her students would write profile articles of the organization’s staff, board members, and homeowners (see example). Continue reading “Designing online service-learning: Examples and considerations”