at a distance, but the enthusiasm of my students soon
got me hooked. Teaching online course has made me
a better teacher, and my student discussions are actually more robust online than they were in my classroom.
OSU's Professional and Non-Credit Education section
will eventually be launching some online urban forestry
courses for continuing education credit as well. Now I'm
teaching a full 25% of my work time.
Learning online takes a different type of self-discipline.
Students must have a certain amount of computer
literacy, but more important they need an intellectual
curiosity coupled with a motivated attitude to see a
course through from start to finish in 10 weeks. Online
education is growing at a phenomenal rate—17% per
year, compared with only 2% in the resident instruction
setting. One in four college students today has taken
an online course. And distance educational delivery is a
great equalizer—it extends access to higher education
to people in remote locations or to those who have fulltime jobs they can't leave to attend college.
My students are quite diverse—some are finishing a
degree they started years ago, while others have migrated into urban forestry from some other job area and are
using my courses to strengthen their credentials. For a
few, my course has been their employee orientation to
an urban forestry position!
Given the pace of technological change in our society, it
is only natural that learning would move online. Urban
forestry is no exception—and I expect to see more and
more online urban forestry education opportunities in
the years to come.
—Paul D. Ries, Instructor & Extension Specialist – Urban
Forestry, Oregon State University College of Forestry
Teaching a practical class like arboriculture can be challenging when you can't just take the students out and show them how to plant a
tree—so instructors like Paul Ries (left) often videotape demonstrations and post them online for his Ecampus students. Photo by Tyler Roth
www.urban-forestry.com
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