Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, online learning was on the rise with the increase of students all over the country opting to attend college online to save money and enable starting a career while still in school.
Winthrop University has multiple online programs with students from all over the country enrolled in them. Christopher J. Ward, a professor in Winthrop’s Department of Social Work and the Online Program Coordinator, heads up one of Winthrop’s most highly acclaimed online degree programs: The online Master of Social Work program.
“Here in the Department of Social Work, we launched our online MSW program in the Fall of 2018 with about 35 students. We now have 275 graduate students in both a 60-hour, three-year program and in our 39-hour, two-year program, which is an advanced standing option for those students that meet certain requirements and have an undergraduate degree in social work,” Ward said. “We admit students in the Fall, Spring and Summer, which is one reason why we have some pretty rapid growth there and we’re meeting the need for those potential students that are out there primarily in our region, the southeast, though we have students up and down the east coast, west coast, pacific northwest, and everything in between.”
The goal in providing an online MSW program is to meet the needs of students who have schedules that do not allow for in-person attendance during the day due to various reasons such as careers, family, along with other personal commitments. “For those students who are overwhelmingly working full time in various careers, we’re a main driver for coming back to school. Part time online is for those who just don’t have the ability to take two years off and come to a campus based graduate program. It’s very expensive. It’s cost prohibitive for a lot of people, so we offer this alternative to work with them within their lives,” Ward said.
More specifically, in Ward’s embedded measures project, he is organizing multiple tactics to further engage his students so that they graduate from the program as well educated and prepared for their careers as the students who attend the MSW program in person.
“We have the standard [class] evaluations that you get there at the end of the semester. Here in the Department of Social Work, we have both those standard College of Arts and Science questions then we have some more specific questions for social work, but we’re really wanting to get at some of the more specific nuances that are in each course,” Ward said.
“This embedded measures project looks to help get that really specific, real time sort of feedback to help us in the development process, so we can better serve our students and see if what we’re hoping, which is, the purpose of that of that activity of that assignment is to help broaden your understanding of your local social service resources,” Ward said.
On top of his idea to create more in-depth course evaluations to allow for student input to promote further improvement in the online courses, Ward and his colleagues have also made activity to help engage students: “We have an activity in an introductory, graduate level policy course, where we’re wanting students to basically do a scavenger hunt for different social services.”
The Department of Social Work is working hard to provide fruitful virtual learning experiences for students all over the country through their online MSW program. Their program “can teach you skills to empower people and communities as a specialized social worker,” according to the Department of Social Work’s page at Winthrop.edu.
“My favorite part of the project is being able to contribute to our commitment to have continual improvement. In regard to me personally, I’m trying to echo and build that over within our online MSW program. I see it as a continual work-in-process to better serve our students who ultimately are going to better serve the community in all the neat Social Work roles they’re going to do once they graduate and we’ll be graduating our first cohort of online students here in the Fall of this year, December of 2020,” Ward said.
Photo by Tate Walden
