2016 Annual Conference

Presenters will offer analysis of survey, interviews, marketing, and budgeting research on transitioning a graduate program in adult education to a fully online format. Session participants will be invited to discuss issues, insights, successes, and lessons learned of our and their own programs’ processes of transition to an online format.

The target audience includes adult educators, educational leaders, and graduate students interested in or already involved in offering online programming for adult education graduate programs.

With the trend of online education delivery models permeating higher education degree programming, many graduate degree programs in adult education have been faced with the possibility/requirement of moving to online delivery. Such is the case for a MA program in adult education at a large public university in the Southwest United States. Like many other programs, ours enjoys strong enrollments in the doctoral program, but the master’s program was challenged to maintain sustainable student counts.
Similar to many higher education faculty, we had little experience with online teaching/programming since we spent the majority of our educational experiences in face-to-face classrooms (Brookfield, 2006). As such, we reviewed the literature at the intersection of adult education and online learning, conducted survey and interview research with program coordinators about their formats, marketing, and administrative processes, garnered professional development and resources support from our college and university administration (Wolf, 2006), conducted research on marketing graduate programs through social media, began the work necessary to translate our program to virtual spaces, and actively engaged in reflection on our practices (McQuiggan, 2012; Wolf, 2006). We will share our research and discuss with participants their own processes and insights in their programs.