This week, I had the pleasure of having a chat with my learning partner Colleen. We discussed our career paths and what lead us to our respective places within the College and University communities. Colleen has a Masters degree in Environmental Management with a special interest in sustainability education throughout all educational disciplines. We discussed that many people with this degree gravitate toward the oil sand and the continued degradation of our prized Canadian environment. She took a different path, focusing on protecting our wonderful land and teaching others different ways everyone can do their part. We discussed the need for the College and University communities to incorporate Environmental Management across all disciplines and how these communities need to address the need for certification courses for things like solar, electric vehicle repairs, and many other sustainable resources that at this point do not have certifications, tickets, or degrees that accompany them.
We went on to discuss the different trends that we are witnessing throughout Adult Education. The idea of Gamification (experiential learning) was a large topic that we had many different ideas about, and the many different ways that we can implement these "games" into many different disciplines across the higher education community. We also discussed different ways we could introduce sustainability into these games, giving learners multiple chances to discover the many different ways of achieving sustainability.
While chatting, we discussed dual credit programs (grade 12 students attending college/university courses in their graduating year). Colleen brought up that in her school, they have received negative feedback from adult learners about dual credit students, saying they felt the younger students took away from the adult learning environment. This caught my interest, as I teach a dual credit program every year. This is something I will incorporate into my future course evaluations. I have never had a student bring this up with me, but I look forward to hearing the feedback.
