Project Title:
Academic and Professional Diversity: A Union of the Minnesota State University Moorhead and the Tribal Colleges of Mahnomen, Cass Lake, Cloquet, Sisseton/Wahpeton and Belcourt/Turtle Mountain
Project Director and Other Associated Faculty and Staff:
Richard Adler, Professor of Speech, Minnesota State University Moorhead. Contact: adlerri@,mnstate.edu. Telephone: (218)477-5841
Bruce Hanson, Chair Dept. of Speech, Minnesota State University Moorhead. Contact: hansonbr@mnstate.edu. Telephone: (218)477-2330
Project Design:
None of the Tribal Colleges offer an associate’s degree in speech pathology or a pre-professional program leading to the associate’s degree in speech pathology. Therefore, this project will design on-line courses available for students at five Tribal Colleges to introduce their students to the field of Speech Pathology. These courses will be culturally sensitive to the Native American population (a group that is underserved in the field) and will be different from traditional on-campus courses offered at MSUM. Teaching methodologies include streaming video power point to make courses interactive. The courses will create a pathway for Native American students to become certified Speech Language Pathologists and/or to pursue four year Speech Pathology degree. The project will support graduate assistantships and stipend for Project Director that will allow him to visit 4 Tribal Colleges and prepare online courses during 2004-2005 academic year.
Project Evaluation and Outcomes:
Attendance at 4 Tribal Colleges’ visits totaled 85 students and some faculty and staff of Colleges. Turtle Mountain College decided they did not wish to participate. In addition, Graduate Assistants were hired to make the three courses (SLHS 101: Introduction to Speech Hearing Sciences, SLHS 201: Introduction to Phonetics, SLHS 202: Physiology of Speech) conform to an online format. These 3 courses will be put online during 2005-2006 academic year. Problems that arose in implementing the project were: (1) MSUS switched from WebCT to Desire to Learn (D2L) for online courses which created many problems with glitches in D2L (e.g. loss of material, server going down). (2) For some courses, copyright approval was needed and online sites would not give permission to use their diagrams in these courses. These problems are still not resolved. (3) Graduate Assistants needed more than the 10 hours per week funded so Project Director took on their duties and extended project to include a second academic year. Evaluation activities included: (1) Evaluation questionnaires were distributed to students at Tribal Colleges’ campus visits but none were returned. (2)After Tribal Colleges’ campus visits, several students visited MSUM and observed the Speech Clinic (3) All students who attended Tribal College campus meetings were provided with the web address of the MSUM Speech Pathology program and the Native American Caucus of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association where they can obtain additional information.
Lessons Learned, Dissemination and Sustainability
The Project Director learned the following as result of the project: (1) Speech Language Pathology are majors at 5 campuses of Minnesota universities, (2) Scholarship monies are available to minority students to pursue these degrees, (3) There are a number of ways to offer on-line courses (e.g. Tegrity System) to make power point presentations interactive, (4) There are ways to offer introductory courses in speech language pathology to multicultural populations by offering cultural sensitive materials, (5) There is a support system within MnSCU system through ‘pathway to learning” to provide mentors for Native Americans majoring in speech pathology, (6) There is a pathway for students in Tribal Colleges to pursue B.S. degree in this field and there a plenty of jobs available.
Dissemination and sustainability will be achieved by:
• Offering at least 2 online speech pathology courses designed to be culturally sensitive for Native American students
• Promoting these courses at cooperating Tribal Colleges
• Promoting these courses on MSUM campus via the Native American counselor
• The I.T. Department at MSUM will work with MNOnline to promote these courses to Native Americans around the country. Also I.T. Department at MSUM will help with completion of the project and to record on-line lectures and address D2L problems.
• Other professors at MSUM in the Speech Pathology Department have offered to help and the Chair of the department has offered secretarial support.
