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Hood College's Graduate Education Programs to Stay Virtual

After a survey showed a clear preference among graduate students of the education program to have their classes online, the Maryland institution has decided to keep that program virtual on a permanent basis.

A person sitting at a table writing in a notebook in front of a laptop for an online class.
(TNS) — Hood College's graduate education programs will remain permanently virtual after shifting online in the spring of 2020, the school announced Monday.

Graduate education students showed "a clear desire for courses to shift permanently online" in a recent survey, school officials wrote in a news release, and have responded positively to the change since it was first implemented.

"Likewise, professors found that the emergence of rapidly developing technologies such as Zoom provided opportunities for lively discussions without being in a physical classroom," the release said. "These innovative tools, coupled with the enthusiasm of Hood students, prompted the college to consider new possibilities for moving ahead during unprecedented times."

Hood's graduate school offers programs that focus on curriculum and instruction, educational leadership, math and reading specializations and more. The education degrees are the most popular across the college's roughly 1,000 graduate students, said graduate school dean April Boulton.

Each education graduate program is designed for current teachers. For the past five years, between 340 and 400 students enrolled in the programs each year, according to Boulton, most of them teachers from Frederick and Montgomery counties.

The shift to online learning, though, has allowed the college to admit students from farther away. The program recently accepted students from Maryland's Eastern Shore and is currently admitting students from as far as California, the release said.

"Hood needs to expand and diversify and meet our students where they are," Boulton said. "And in many cases, that's online. They don't want to come to campus one night a week. They want to be able to log in from their home or workplace."

The programs began the process of seeking accreditation for virtual instruction from the Maryland State Department of Education and the Maryland Higher Education Commission about a year ago, Boulton said.

Since then, online instructional experts have trained professors in best practices for synchronous and asynchronous virtual instruction.

"It is very different from what you do standing in front of a class on campus." Boulton said. "There are different practices that you want to employ online to really engage that online student."

©2022 The Frederick News-Post (Frederick, Md.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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