Educators use guest speaker(s) in their onsite learning environments for the purpose of providing educational and real world experience to their learners. This particular teaching method helps with delivering learning objectives & outcomes. The same teaching method can be used within an online learning environment to deliver learning objectives & outcomes. This presentation will focus on reasons for implementing a guest speaker and the various goals a guest speaker can help an educator achieve within an online learning environment.
There will be a mixture of strategies used in the presentation. 1) Open discussion on the topic, objectives, outcomes/goals, and challenges for using a guest speaker 2) An activity where learners create and share their idea(s) for using a guest speaker and what they would like to accomplish 3) Former guest speakers who have participated in an online learning environment discuss their experience, and 4) Further research and conclusion.
Takeaways from the presentation are: 1) new perspective on course design, 2) the impact of being creative when delivering learning objectives and meeting outcomes for the learners. 3) a method for including real world expertise into the course 4) establishing a connections between Learner-Educator-and-SME.
Emphasis a main goal of incorporating a guest speaker to an online learning environment in order to demonstrate to learners that an abundant, if not, all of the content which is covered throughout a course will be used in a real world scenario. The guest speakers has gone through the educational stage of establishing their career and the information that was taught in their respected course work helped them advance in their career.
There are difference between incorporating a guest speaker in an onsite learning environment versus online and being able to discussed the differences in critical to ensure the guest speaker has a positive influence on the learning environment is critical.
Analyzing the feedback from the students as well as the guest speaker on their experience helps with understanding the effectiveness of adding a guest speaker will provide data on ways to further improve and expand the experience for all the shareholders.
