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Rehabilitation Counseling master's program uses $1 million grant to create opportunity
May 2009
In developing the College of Education's Rehabilitation Counseling master's program 10 years ago, Dr. Randall McDaniel envisioned possibilities presented by emerging technology. The proliferation of such devices such as Apple's iPhone and iPod have changed the nature of distance learning altogether, tearing down barriers and allowing for the creation of more intimate educational environments.
"When I started this program, my goal was to get it to where it was a portable program and people could carry it in their pockets,'' said McDaniel, Distance Education Program director and Wayne T. Smith distinguished professor in the Department of Special Education, Rehabilitation, Counseling/School Psychology. "We didn't have the technology at the time, but we knew it was coming.''
Those instantaneous electronic delivery systems are part of what keep the Rehabilitation Counseling master's program going and enable it to broaden the skill sets of practitioners from as far away as Alaska. A five-year, $1 million Comprehensive System of Personnel Development (CSPD) grant from the Rehabilitation Services Administration will allow the program to provide scholarships for 14 working rehabilitation counselors interested in obtaining their master's degrees without relocating or interrupting their everyday work. It will also enable the program to develop new ways to leverage new technological devices as teaching tools and as a means of accommodating students with disabilities.
"We're going to buy all the students an iPhone or an iTouch and put part of our program on that device for them,'' McDaniel said. "They'll be able to access their classes and syllabi and Blackboard and different things. It's incredible.''
McDaniel said he and the team that worked on the grant proposal - program assistant Dawn Browning and doctoral students Richard Helling, Linda Fisher and Bedarius Bell - have discussed creating downloadable flash cards to help students prepare for national certification exams. Other possibilities include the development of an iPhone application that would provide a screen reader for students with visual impairments.
Such inventiveness helps explain why Auburn's CSPD grant application was ranked fourth nationally in a peer review assessment of the six programs funded by the RSA. In April, U.S.News and World Report ranked the Rehabilitation Counseling program 17th nationally and 14th among public institutions in its annual survey of top graduate programs.
Students in the Rehabilitation Counseling master's program receive all of their classes via video streaming and can receive direct instruction on the computer or through Auburn's distance education studio. McDaniel said the two-year program expects to serve between 20 and 30 students from the Southeast to the Pacific Northwest. McDaniel said the program actively recruits professionals from as far away as Oregon and Alaska with the help of agencies in those states.
While most of the instruction in the master's program spans the globe with the help of digital devices, McDaniel said the distance education program offers opportunities for face-to-face interaction between students and professors. The students in the program are brought to Auburn's campus once a semester in order to foster a sense of connectedness.
"The most important thing in a distance ed program is to have a learning community so people don't feel like they're isolated out there by themselves,'' McDaniel said. "We do so much to foster that and have these students feel like they're cared about. What we've found is that the best recruitment tool we have are our former students.''
To learn more about the Rehabilitation Counseling master's program, click here.
To view podcasts of previous classes, click here.
Last Updated: May 17, 2011
