A week in the life of a Foster Parent Education Student
Online Foster Parent Education (OFPE) students are the same as any other student. They have busy lives and try to fit all of their normal activities into their day... along with taking classes.
Taking classes online allows them to choose convenient times each day to "attend" class. They get up early and login, or maybe they stay up after the kids are in bed; perhaps they use their lunch hour, or login between errands when the kids are at school. . The student takes responsibility, becomes self-directed as a learner and plans the time needed to complete the coursework.
Most students will be online 5 out of 7 days a week. Here is a fictitious weekly student schedule:
Day 1: Check in the first day of each week. The workshops are structured week by week to facilitate student interaction and keep everyone moving along to complete coursework by the end of the three-week session. Read the announcements and review the intended outcomes for the week. Next, review assignments and review instructor's lecture material.
Day 2: Login to begin reading lessons/activities and post answers to assigned study questions on the Discussion Board. Typically, the instructor will create an area where the students can ask questions to be answered by the instructor or other students. This is a great resource for answering questions that you cannot find answers to in the readings.
Day 3: Check in today to see if there are any new announcements. Next, go to the discussion board and review classmates' responses. Make sure to comment on several other students' responses to the material, seeing where they missed a critical item and helping another student clarify their work by asking a thoughtful question.
Day 4: This day is full of family activities. No time to check in!
Day 5: A discussion has taken place where the need for more research has been identified. Students were placed into groups and were given tasks as one person undertook the group leader role. A few hours were spent seeking and reading online library journal articles to complement the earlier work.
Day 6: Today's work involves reviewing the draft prepared by the group leader and making final comments via group area posts. The second login of the day was to post the second assignment. Later in the day, a third login revealed that the group leader had completed processing the parts turned in by others in the group and submitted it to the proper discussion forum for the entire class to review. Theirs was the first done!
Day 7: Most of the time online this day was spent reviewing the other group projects that were posted. Thoughtful questions were addressed in several cases and all of the comments from the other students led to interesting additions to the week's content. Several of those were going to be very useful in their work with foster children. Tomorrow starts a new week!
