Educating Speech-Language Pathologists for the 21st Century: Course Design Considerations for a Distance Education Master of Speech Pathology Program

Abstract

The landscape of tertiary education is changing. Developments in information and communications technology have created new ways of engaging with subject material and supporting students on their learning journeys. Therefore, it is timely to reconsider and re-imagine the education of speech-language pathology (SLP) students within this new learning space. In this paper, we outline the design of a new Master of Speech Pathology course being offered by distance education at Charles Sturt University (CSU) in Australia. We discuss the catalyst for the course and the commitments of the SLP team at CSU, then describe the curriculum design process, focusing on the pedagogical approach and the learning and teaching strategies utilised in the course delivery. We explain how the learning and teaching strategies have been selected to support students' online learning experience and enable greater interaction between students and the subject material, with students and subject experts, and among student groups. Finally, we highlight some of the challenges in designing and delivering a distance education SLP program and identify future directions for educating students in an online world.

Swedish Pharmacy Students’ Expectations and Perceptions of Their Education and Future Pharmacy Profession

“…The reasons for choosing a web-based education, i.e., flexibility, the possibility to combine university studies with work, and because of difficulties in moving to the place of the university due to family or other commitments in their hometown, are in line with previous research and reports [2,[4][5][6]. The students appear to be satisfied with the setup of the web-based education, including the structure of the program, the pedagogical setup, and the online material.…”

“…Web-based education has been shown to offer flexibility, facilitating the combination of university studies with life and job commitments [4][5][6]. Indeed, flexibility is often stated as one major reason for choosing a web-based format [2].…”

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“…13 Distance education has been shown to overcome the limitations of time and space; it is flexible and accessible around other life and work commitments. [14][15][16] This may be why web-based programs attract certain types of students, e.g. students with the need for greater flexibility in their studies because of work and/or family commitments.…”

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“…Work using the tools is producing an emergent body of literature describing a range of applications in collaborative course design (Thomson et al, 2018) in online program development in speech therapy (McCormack et al, 2014); embedding indigenous content, (Zundans-Fraser et al, 2018), and in integrating engineering standards (Morgan et al, 2017).…”