This blog contains excerpts from the “Planning Resource for Developing a Two-Year Emergency Management Academic Program” (March 2019) and reflects the collective contribution of the time and expertise of several individuals sharing their dedication to preparing the next generation of emergency management professionals.
Join the national community of two-year emergency management program discussion!
Did you know that FEMA Higher Education Program includes Special Interest Groups (SIG) to inform the emergency management profession through education and to promote and connect our nation’s academic community members? This effort includes a SIG entitled Collaboration, Connection, and Commitment of 2-Year Emergency Management Programs. The next few weeks of the blog will focus on planning resources for two-year programs. This week, let’s look at Delivery Mode and Sequencing considerations for two-year programs.
Delivery Mode and Sequencing Considerations
Student populations vary widely and can range from part- or full-time students, working and non-working individuals, with differing prerequisite needs, course loads, and availability. Consult with your institution’s administration and research division personnel to understand basic student audience data.
Review the ideal timeline for degree completion with a broad approach, such as daytime, evening, or both, and develop course sequencing to support the overarching program goals. Consider balancing general education, discipline, lecture and application/performance-based activities, required, and elective components of the curriculum. Be aware of the concluding program learning experience, such as a capstone project, internship, apprenticeship, and other building blocks needed throughout the program to achieve overall success.
Determining the delivery mode of classroom, online, hybrid, synchronous, poly-synchronous, lecture capture, etc. courses is challenging and often requires knowledge of the institutional distance education environment, skilled online instructors, and course content rich with learning objects, applications, discussions, and the preference of the market audience – students. Other factors to explore include rigor, speed of completion, quality of instruction, quality of technology, and class size.
In addition to all these considerations, be realistic in the length of time it takes to start up and populate a program. Consider a three-year start-up period until class loads begin to stabilize.
Join us next week as we discuss “General Education Curricula” for an Emergency Management 2-Year Academic Program. In the meantime, please enjoy our one-pager that we created. It’s designed to help programs get started using the resource we’re discussing! Promote2YearCritInfluencers
