The minicourse is meant to be a “short, focused learning experience” that will provide the student with “targeted knowledge and skills (UMGC, 2024a).” I am going to look to focus on a real-life example that would be of use at my current job. Working with student leaders at a community college requires training. Training to not only let the students know of their specific roles within student government, but also how to be leaders. So, I want to focus my minicourse on 3 modules. 

• Module one will be general student government training. This will include reviewing and learning the constitution for the college, important figures within the college, and what their specific roles are.

• Module two will see the practical work of the student government. Knowing their roles and responsibilities are and what committees they may be part of, module two will explore how meetings are held at the student government level, committee level, and the campus level. Module two will allow the students to practice their roles within these meetings and provide example material for specific members to share. Robert’s Rules of Order will be reviewed to begin and practice with this will be important for all members to memorize for voting procedures.

• Module three will look at leadership instruction. All elected student government officers are leaders in their own capacity, whether they are a representative or the president. They are all expected to be able to provide information and advocate for their fellow students at their campus, in the classroom, or in state government opportunities (such as Maryland's Student Advocacy Day). As student leaders, they are often asked to listen to the concerns of their peers and work to address them. They need to have an understanding of how to listen to a concern and what they are expected to do with it. Concerns can range from complaints about DSS, issues with learning technology, a resource closing early, or an event being changed/taken away. They will hear these throughout their term and need to know what to do with them. Leadership extends beyond their school, it extends to the community and their life beyond school. This module will set the student up to become an active leader beyond college.

Having these modules be online will be a change for how they have been done historically, but hopefully, this helps to better train the students in the long run. I am going to utilize gamification to assist with motivation and learning. I am targeting behaviorism as one of the learning theories specifically because it can be used to help the students early on in the material and will be useful for the building blocks. Behaviorism does seem that we are ignoring the cognitive aspects and focusing so much on the measurables, so a limiting factor of this is that the individual student might not be catered to the best. If they are struggling with the material or become bored by being ahead, then we risk losing them.

With gamification, I would like to specifically use experience points to track progression through the modules, each one requiring a test/trial/"boss" to move to the next level (module). I don't want to use leaderboards specifically, but students could openly discuss that they are on level three or facing a specific trial, and that could be the competition between them.

These modules are going to be focused on the student's upcoming responsibilities and duties, so real-world application is going to be incredibly important. The minicourse will look to engage the student where they are at and remain mindful of that, helping them take their potential and reach it with either the instructor or their peers, using Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and the More Knowledgable Other to help drive this hope. This will be online and asynchronous, to allow for the students to complete it on their schedule. It will be difficult to always be able to drive the conversation/collaboration with this being the case, so it will either require the instructor to be readily available at all hours, or restrict it to a class.

In this course specifically, having collaboration with the students and discussion/group work (fake meetings) would be important for me. Using cooperative learning and potentially reciprocal learning would be a great start (UMGC, 2024a) and this would be seen with the fake meetings or even sharing what their position is meant to do in the student government. Making sure that the instructor is available to act as the More Knowledgable Other will additionally be of assistance.

This will be a course for young adults in student government in college. Using the six principles of Andragogy would be important for me in crafting the course, with the principles being:

1. Need to know (Wil, 2020)

2. Experience (Wil, 2020)

3. Self-Concept (Wil, 2020)

4. Readiness (Wil, 2020)

5. Problem Orientation (Wil, 2020)

6. Intrinsic Motivation (Wil, 2020)

By making sure that the course touches on all of these, such as explaining the why of the constitution, why they need to know all of the roles and/or building off their previous experience. I hope to make this course better suited for them as adults. They are not the same learners that they were when they were kids, so we must respect that and allow them to have their role in the process. They might already know their experience and why it is important to learn to be a student leader, but they still need to be able to see how the material is directly related to their position within student government, along with seeing real examples of what they might be asked to work on/do.

There may be issues with the maturity at the time, they might be freshly graduated and need more structure and to have less autonomy. This is solved by having deadlines and check-ins. The additional issue may come that the student is only interested in being a student leader for compensation (something that my college does) or for resume building. The reason motivation may be a limiting factor is because the student that wants this as a resume point may not care enough to complete the course or learn the material, as opposed to the ones who are motivated to make a difference on their campus.