Sara Dolan
Associate Dean for Professional Development
Students in our online/hybrid and professional graduate programs tend to come to Baylor in the midst of a successful career, with the goal of earning an advanced degree to make a larger impact on their field. Most of these students are distance learners, bringing their Baylor education right to their local communities. But make no mistake, even if they don’t live in the Waco area, they are Baylor Bears.
We have a goal of being a more inclusive Graduate School. To that end, we have been working to expand our academic resources for online/hybrid students. Most of these graduate programs are training clinical health professionals with specific continuing education requirements; however, as these programs grow, so does our understanding of how we can service students learning in a virtual environment.
We are offering more virtual workshop opportunities, including a library of asynchronous Graduate Pathways to Success (GPS) workshops addressing academic success, job search preparation, and wellness topics.
One opportunity for how the Graduate School can impact our hybrid research doctoral students is in our collaboration with Graduate and Professional Education, and most notably with the EDD in Learning and Organizational Change (EDD-LOC) program leadership. This collaboration resulted in ongoing activities that were initiated by both the Graduate School and the EDD-LOC program. We broadened the criteria for outstanding graduate student awards, and this year the first student from an online/hybrid program, the EDD-LOC, won the 2023 Outstanding Dissertation Award in Social Sciences.
In Summer, 2023, we invited distance learners to campus to participate in the Dissertation Lab, which was a way for EDD-LOC students to connect to campus and to work on dissertation writing. Our two-way collaboration also led to the EDD-LOC program-initiated Alumni Speaker Series, a monthly virtual professional development workshop that is open to all graduate students. This series offers opportunities for students to engage more with the “professional” skills needed for career success, like how to network, while the Graduate School’s workshops have focused more on academic skills, such as how to craft a statement of research for job or fellowship applications. We are currently working with additional hybrid professional education programs including the Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) and Occupational Therapy (OTD) to find ways to collaborate to support student development.
Although our professional program students are more likely to have established social lives in their communities, it is important that they feel a connection to other Baylor students. The Graduate Student Association (GSA) serves this function, on top of their established academic events like the Graduate Research Showcase and Three Minute Thesis competitions. The GSA now offers more community and connection opportunities by holding hybrid Assembly meetings, online social events, and maintaining a consistent presence of the hybrid student voice in all GSA decisions. And this is paying off. The GSA has elected a committee chairperson for online community, coming alongside each program’s representative, to host exclusively virtual social events.
Much of the growth in how the Graduate School addresses the needs of online/hybrid students and programs is in our communication with our students. We send an email, the Two Week Outlook Newsletter, to all students each week, announcing upcoming deadlines, campus events, and other opportunities for graduate students. We indicate which opportunities are available to distance learners, and we send all online/hybrid students a separate email containing events exclusively offered virtually. This has resulted in a greater awareness of what resources and opportunities are available to Baylor students who may not live in the greater Waco area.
We continue to work in concert with the Graduate and Professional Education office, as well as program leadership, to help our online/hybrid students experience Baylor to its fullest. These programs will continue to grow in number and reach, and so will the students’ connections to Baylor.