TPC-Journal-V1-Issue1

The Professional Counselor \ Volume 1, Issue 1 23 train counselors unacceptable and virtually insurmountable. Because counseling is a person-to-person experience, it can be particularly difficult for counselor educators to envision how counseling students could be trained and evaluated effectively through a text-based, online experience where course participants cannot see and interact with each other in real time. The online group course described in the following section was designed to address all three of Garrison et al.’s (2000) elements of a community of inquiry by combining synchronous and asynchronous experiences that much more closely simulate an F2F educational experience. Moreover, our experience has been that use of readily-available technology has allowed us not only to more closely simulate face-to-face classroom experiences, but also to take advantage of features unique to the online experience. The Online Course: Group Counseling in Schools To meet the needs of practicing school counselors for additional post-master’s degree training in school counseling, the counselor education program at one southeastern university created an online-only Post-Master’s Certificate (PMC) in Advanced School Counseling. This program was designed to provide working school counselors with 12 hours of additional training that also would qualify them for a significant salary increase in the state system. Over a two-year period, four graduate-level courses were developed for this program. The first of these courses, Group Counseling in Schools, was created and used to pilot test an instructional model for the remaining courses. To do this, the first author worked closely with university instructional technology consultants to create an online learning environment that could be process-based and provide a student-focused learning environment in which student participation was critical to the quality and success of the course itself. The result was an online course that incorporated both OAD and OSD components. The Asynchronous Component (OAD) Blackboard is well known and widely used as an educational platform “for delivering learning content, engaging learners, and measuring their performance” (http://www. Blackboard .com/Teaching-Learning/Learn-Platform.aspx) in higher education. Blackboard is primarily an asynchronous learning platform which offers a format that provides for easy posting of course information and a wide variety of course resources. Features include a discussion board with forums that provide opportunities for students to respond to prompts, discuss issues, and share ideas in an OAD where postings can be made and responded to at any time. Blackboard currently is used widely to supplement F2F instruction. In our online group course, Blackboard ’s discussion board is used to allow students to take more time to reflect on their learning and encourages them to think more critically about online experiences and course material. Because instructors typically do not participate in these discussions, both responsibility and control are shifted to students for the quality and content of their postings. We have been very interested to see how learning conversations develop as students learn to respond not just to instructor-generated prompts, but also to each other, sharing support, differing perspectives, and experiences. Instructors’ review of the weekly postings is then used to help guide course content and discussion in the OSD component of the course. The Synchronous Component (OSD) LinguaMOO (MOO) is an interactive, synchronous learning platform that is available in its basic form for free (see http://www.ericdigests.org/1997-4/moo.htm), with technical support provided by each individual institution. MOO was developed as a community that is designed to simulate F2F environments in many ways using technology that is affordable and easily implemented. MOO is text-based and utilizes a very basic chat environment. More capable, commercial software packages that are now becoming widely used include Elluminate (a free, virtual, collaborative web- conferencing system; http://www. Elluminate .com) and Saba Centra Classroom (which offers a complete set of features for recreating interactive classroom learning experiences online; http://www.saba.com/products/centra/details.htm). Both of these packages add greatly enhanced capabilities for using audio, video, whiteboards, and graphics as part of online class meetings, providing a wide variety of tools to use in creating a virtual environment for learning. In the online MOO class, when students come to class, they enter the instructor’s room, which is the virtual classroom.