General Information Session – Wake Forest University Online MAC Program

Webinar Transcript:

Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Wake Forest University’s Master of Arts in Counseling and Master of Arts Human Services Online Program information session. Please note that this webinar is needed. If you have any questions during the presentation please type them into the chat box which is located on the control panel and submit your questions. After the webinar you will be able to obtain slides in the archives recording. Please contact your enrollment adviser. The contact information is listed on the left side of this presentation.

Today we have three speakers who will be leading the webinar. We have Pamela Carts who is an instructor for counseling from Wake Forest University. Pamela had been a Program and Admissions Manager at Wake Forest University since she graduated in 1995. Pamela is the National Career Counselor in North Carolina since she graduated in 1995. Pamela is the National Career Counselor at North Carolina Licensed Professional Counselor. The primary area of interest is in Career Counseling, holding leadership roles in career counseling state organization such as North Carolina Career Development Association and North Carolina Counseling Association. Pamela loves to help people especially students.

We have [inaudible] who is the lead instructional designer working in partnership at Wake Forest University to develop their online program. As an instructional designer, she works with professors to suggest strategies for gapping their courses to the online environment. Joe works to maintain a level of consistency between courses and to introduce new learning technologies and initiatives. And lastly we have Jacqueline North, Enrollment advisor for Wake Forest University’s Online Master of Arts in Counseling and Master of Arts in Human Services Program. Jacqueline along with Kimberly Robinson are the enrollment advisers for the program and the contact information we will have the list at the last slide of this presentation to answer any questions that you may have. Blake Camel will talk about Wake Forest University, providing overview of the Masters in Counseling and Masters in Human Services Program and curriculum and talk about highly experienced faculty. Joe Hamengly will talk about the online experience and take you through a short demonstration of what a course actually looks like. Jacqueline North will then discuss the enrollment requirements and will conclude the section answering any questions you may have. So if you wanna ask any questions [inaudible] which is located on the right hand side of your control panel. And I’ll turn over to the Programs and Admissions Manager Pamela Car who will speak more about Wake Forest University.

Speaker 2: — Department of Counseling. As you mentioned I’m a program graduate too and I’ve been working as a program manager since I graduated. I will provide you with the usual information but not too much information as you consider joining our programs. Little bit about Wake Forest University. For those of you who are not familiar was established in 1834, located in Winston, Salem North Carolina, a beautiful place and it is a liberal arts college, small to medium size with a lot of research capability also. It’s consistently ranked among the top 25 universities in the country. Now the Managing Counseling Program people often say are you rank two? I don’t see on the writings. We’re not eligible to be ranked we don’t have a doctorate level program also. We prefer to focus on our interchange on the master level program but from a number of sources I can say with great confidence this program is widely regarded as one of the nation’s best master’s degree program and that’s where we focus our energy.

Okay. Now, the spirit of service is the first thing listed about Wake Forest that’s because the motto is pro-humanitate which means for humanity. What better programs exemplify and embody pro humanitate than the counseling program and the Master of Arts in Human Services program. We are committed to training highly skilled people who want to serve the needs of their community. We were doing the ranks of alumni who are known as community leaders, advocates for their clients, and skilled practitioners. Our faculty led by example and pro humanitate for instance that they went, Dr. Gladding went to New York in the aftermath of 9/11, provide counseling for families of victims. Three of them went down to the coast right after Hurricane Katrina, volunteered their time working with folks who were affected by that disaster. And right after those sad shootings at Virginia Tech, that faculty got on the phone to our faculty and they were there on campus trying to help there so more about that during some orientation courses. We have a proud clinical skills focus. Most programs across the nation require one skills and techniques course. We require two for both the counseling and human services programs. In addition to those two courses, you have to do some to supervised professional experience in your field. 800 hours are required in the counseling program, 350 hours are required in the Master of Arts in Human Services Program. The result of all these focus is that when we speak to people who have employed our graduates and have recruited them into their doctorate programs they say your reputation for your counsels having the strongest counseling and interpersonal skills is very strong so they work on that with you. Student center model means we really try hard to make sure you have the tools to succeed and that we have well defined goals and we can provide you with training even before you start, on how you’re going to succeed in this course, make sure you know how do you followed those new tools that you may or may not or know how to use but you’re gonna need when you’re in a real course. This commitment to excellence is the reason I’m talking to you today. Almost as a staff member I was given the opportunity to step into one of the leading roles in the online programs and the reason I said yes primarily is that I and the other faculty are totally committed to making this learning experience comparable in every way to our existing on campus program.

So let’s talk a little bit about the Master of Arts in Counseling program. So this is kind of exciting for us to be offering it online today in truth because since 1969 we have educated 15 excellent counselors a year. Not many although it goes up to 600 by now. But this online venue is gonna give us an opportunity to produce more top notch counselors and also touch the market of folks that I talk to almost every day on the phone and say I’d love to come to your program but I just can’t quit working and lose the salary for two years. I’ve got to work. So this program is for you if you fall into those categories. The vast majority of course work is the same whether you are in the clinical mental health track or the school counseling track. We wanna develop those essential skills and take the same kind of foundation fundamental courses together. Then you will have an online to take exactly the same courses under the exact same professors as those on campus program just maybe on a little bit of a different order. But if you are in a clinical mental health field track you will have three specialty courses that you will have in addition to the core in common courses. And those will teach you things specific to clinical mental health treatment planning, all the things you need. Now it’s hard to describe clinical mental health because it’s such a deep field. It does involve working with patients with mental health issues but it also involves working with patients that have just developed mental issues. They’re stuck, they can’t, they need to change their behavior to do something else or they’re stuck at a certain phase in their life and you will be able to and train to help them decide what new direction to move on. It also got a very very strong wellness component because we believe in preventing mental health issues as much as possible.

So where you work if you graduate? We got a database of all our 600 and I can tell you they work in many many settings like mental health agencies, a lot of them are in private practice especially a little bit later on in their career. They work in treatment abuse services, they work with children services, they’re in college settings and all kinds of different offices there particularly counseling centers and career centers. They’re career counselors, almost you can, almost you pick a place that doesn’t need to counsel to work there. Now if you follow the school counseling track then we’re preparing you to work in K to 12 educational setting, universities and colleges you need to go that falls under clinical mental. College school counseling, we are trying to train folks with the basic core courses that we’ve got because we believe in developing strong counselor’s burst and then specialist second. So the specialist part of being in the school counseling track is that you learn particular techniques for counseling children, how to provide guidance for children and teenagers, what important issues are facing students today. There’s so many nuisance now. Also they work with teachers on how to be not just a part of the school team but how to be one of the leaders of the school team as you try to promote wellness of all the children in their school, in your community and around the world.

Now, it’s important that this program you choose to take for counseling are accredited by CACREP. That stands for the Counsel for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs because if you are a graduate of one of those programs the way to license here is a little easier, you are able to take the national counselor exam while you’re a student. That leads to a certification as a nationally certified counselor which is the NCC as I am and also it’s the same test used for licensure in most states. So if you don’t go to a CACREP institution you probably have to do more hours of supervised practice before you become fully licensed. No one graduates from any counseling program licensed because all states require that you have additional supervised practice before you become fully licensed. You’ll gonna be from all over the country so early in our program we know we’re gonna be working with you hard and making sure you research the licensure requirements in the state or states that you planned practice. Maybe there’s another course you need or help you figure out a plan for getting that in there.

Now, the human services folks also can seek a credential called the Human Services Board Certified Practitioner and that’s not a required credential but it really helps in your resume if you can state and sit you both some of the others working, looking for work in that field. We are a member of CSHSE, here’s the alphabet, Counselors for Standards in Human Services Education and students enrolled in degree program that hold membership can sit for their required exam for this credential while in school. But just like licensure for counselor’s additional hours of experience are needed post-graduation. We’ll learn more a whole lot about that on our orientation course together.

So how does this counseling degree work? Well each track requires 60 credit hours. We need the next slide, there we are. 60 credit hours and it takes 3 years to complete. Typically you will take 2 courses every semester, that’s 2 every fall, 2 spring and 2 summer while you’re enrolled to get three on 3 years. I like the way it’s set up to take one course at a time so you will have to concentrate totally on one course for 7 and a half weeks and then the second course for 7 and a half weeks. Those 60 hours, and now I’m specifically in the counseling program again include 800 hours of clinical experience, 3 clinical courses cover those practicum and internships. So while you’re enrolled in practicum and internship you will be working on a site in your community. How do I know what site to pick? We will guide you there. This will be a partnership. It will start early because we know what kinds of site you need and what kind of experiences we want you to have so you can be fully developed as a counselor. We also have a very strict set of requirements for your site supervisor so we wanna make sure that we approve those too so that everything will go on smoothly. During the time you’re enrolled in these classes you also will be interfacing with your other students who are doing their clinical practice too so you will be in a class with around 12 or and practicum even 6 other students with supervisors go lower. You will have a faculty supervisor who’s the head of your particular course, you will have some individual supervision done by that faculty and by AJA faculty that they have trained and you’ll also have the supervision by your site supervisor on site.

So we will need to meet you by the way. We can’t imagine training counselors without at least meeting you a little bit face to face and that’s one reason we’re also trying to meet you through the interview that is required. You’re gonna be coming to campus for two long weekends, Thursday night to Sunday morning, about 20 hours we got to work together. These face to face sessions will allow faculty to do projects, presentations connected with the courses you have that’s taken, there’ll be some competency exams involved. We will work on planning and evaluating your internship and practicum arrangements. These dates will be announced 6 months in advance. Please note this is serious. We really need you to attend these. But just think how much fun it will be to actually meet your professors and the students that you previously meet online, it will be a joyous fun time together. Classes will be held on campus, we’ll be publishing a list of hotels that are giving Wake Forest discounts and I’m helping design that experience and it just looks like a wonderful time together.

Okay, let’s move on to some of the particulars about the Master of Arts in Human Services then. It’s a little harder to define just because it’s such a deep. It says Human Services profession is dedicated to providing help to those in need of assistance both preventative and treatment levels. There’s that preventative again. There’s a wellness focus for sure. Now, counselors perform a lot of times more on the roles of the one on one with a person or a group therapist but students who want to serve order others and maybe other than therapy, you certainly will have some wonderful interpersonal skills may want to do it in leadership positions or management positions or administrative positions and so that is the scope of that. The primary purpose of the human service worker is to assist individuals and families and communities to function as effectively as possible in their communities. So human services worker according to the National Organization of Human Services benefit generic term for people who hold professional jobs in such diverse settings as group homes, halfway houses, correctional institutions, those who care for Alzheimer’s patients, those who care for the mentally retarded, community health centers, agencies that serve families and children or youth, programs who are concerned with treatment of alcoholism or drug abuse, prevention of family violence, services to the aged. It goes on and on. It’s almost every non-profit institution in your community would be potential employer for you and your passion for serving people. You have many roles. You can serve as an advocate, the role of outreach would choose you know for reaching potential clients, making sure the community knows they’re available there, advocating for the homeless or for the children, whoever it is that you serve, doing some caregiving yourself.

So how do this program work? How do you like it? How is it different than the curriculum in the counseling program? It’s 39 credits to graduate. It is 13 courses in length. It takes two years and one additional semester or 7 semesters, same pattern year round, two courses at a time, 10 of those courses are the exact thing courses that you would get in the counseling curriculums. So that’s common just like the specialty areas. Then you have your three specialty courses to prepare you for your specialty role. Those specific courses will have areas that study that you think you need in these management and volunteer systems that will include organizational management, supervision of staff, supervision of volunteers, strategic planning, budgeting, how to do grant writing, contract negotiation, legal and ethical and regulatory issues, management of staff, recruiting and management of volunteers, advocacy techniques. We’re excited about that program of study as well. You will have field experience also at a site in your community. It is a learning experience. We will help you find with the proper supervision and the proper experiences. 350 hours of onsite work in the agency. So as you discover some of the places that strike your passion that you would like to work with, that will give you the kind of experience that you think you will apply in your career, we will work with you to determine what your role should be, what activities, you know and what your instructional needs based on the placement site possibilities. You’ll also be in class with other students at that time.

So which degree to choose kind of depends on your career goals? Both are gonna be very strong programs preparing people with strong interpersonal skills. Do you wish to serve people primarily by providing one on one group therapeutic service or do you wish to focus your efforts more administratively? Both will be pro- humanitate serving. Well, that was a lot of information. We’ll be ready for questions later.

They also asked me to take a few minutes and talk to you briefly about the faculty that you’ll be working with. There’s a picture of a bunch of our faculty there. Well a team of a positive talented and good hearted people. I’m so lucky to be here. We’ll have a deeper look at what they’ve been up to around the world during our pre-orientation course. But briefly just a little bit about each one of them, Dr. Sam Gladding who is the Chair, way over to the left, I don’t know if you have your pointer Celina but we’ll go with her without it if you do. He is Chair of our department and he will be teaching your orientation to professional counseling course different than orientation to learning course but Dr. Gladding, oh where to start with him. He has held the most prestigious national offices in the counseling world. He’s probably the most well-known name at this point. He doesn’t want to be called an elder state man. So we won’t call him that. He has been President of the American Counseling Association and many other offices. He is a writer of more text books that are used in counseling programs than any man in the country. You will probably be asked to use some of his text books. We have talked him out of the fact that they know that’s the best book so we’re gonna use. And he has lectured internationally to places like Malaysia, Turkey, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, kind of have quite a map to show you his travels. We tease him because he has won more awards than we can believe and we tell him he has a plaque buildup in his office and please don’t bring us anymore.

Okay, back to Donna Henderson. Dr. Henderson is there in the blue and she is the Director of Online Education. She is my partner in this event and leading the rest of the pack. She’s also the head of the School Counseling track. She will teach you specialty courses in school guidance and counseling children. She’s also an expert in legal and ethical issues. That is the category that are, she’s proud to point that our students score the highest of any other program when they take that national test. So you’ll know you’re legal and ethic, believe me. One of the things that I mentioned about her is she co-wrote this curriculum for Mental Health Facilitator Training that’s sponsored by the World Health Organization and the National Beaurue for Counseling, the NBCC. In fact she’s down the hall right now. She’s conducting a training that she has conducted for people in Bhutan, in Mexico and Turkey, for by request of the students in our program who are gonna be graduating in a couple of weeks. She’s put together notebooks and they will all be certified. So it’s such a parting gift for the group. She wrote primary textbooks in School Counseling. You’ll see her name on those. And she herself has been the president of many organizations, national. She for instance has been the president of the Counseling Honor Society, CSI, Chi Sigma Iota. Students who have high enough GPA will be invited to join that during their studies with us.

Okay, little facts to some of the others. Debby Newsome is between Sam and Donna. She’s the Director of our Clinical Mental Health program, expert on that field. He sounds like a broken record but she broke the primary text that’s being used for clinical mental health courses. In fact she was away from us this semester updating that book and we miss her. Her specialty courses are career counseling and the clinical mental health counseling specialty courses.

Then we have Jose De Alba in right next to Dona in the front. Jose is the Director of the Human Services Program and he’s also the Director of our minor or only undergrad minor. We have Counseling is not really an undergrad minor so we have a Health and Human Services minor. His specialty area courses are Cultures in Counseling and the School Counseling Clinical and Specialty courses. He’s bilingual. He’s very interested in expanding services to Hispanic population and he’s gonna be working with the next. So let’s talk about Dr. Philip Clark who’s the tall guy between the shoulders up there above at our new Alzheimer’s Clinic. Everybody here has their passion in their field of service. So for Philip Clark and the person away over to the right it’s Shaw and with also Jose right now. They have started a counseling program in conjunction with Wake Ford Baptist Medical Center in Memory Assessment Clinic for individuals and families affected by Alzheimer’s disease. So counselors are partners with doctors. As far as we know this is one of the very few programs in the country that provide individual group counseling services for Alzheimer and dementia victims. Philip Clark specially courses advance skills, addiction counseling and some of the issues in clinical mental health courses. We’re so happy to have him with us too.

Also in the picture, not really as was at Sam’s shoulder, that’s Heidi Robinson. She teaches our career courses for undergrads and then there I am there between Debby and Donna and then we have a retired Administrative Assistant, he’s the last picture person over there to the right, not pictured but important. And joining us in the fall are three people. Dr. Nathaniel Ivers. Pleased to say class of 2006 Wake Forest, one of the brightest and best is coming back to join us after obtaining his Doctoral Degree from UNC Charlotte, I mean UNC Greensborough and working in Texas at the university that’s based at San Antonio. He will be joining your research and statistics and your basic skills courses. Jennifer Rogers, ABD which means all but dissertations and she’s almost there. Is also class of 2008, Graduate of the Wake Forest Program. She’s teaching for us part time right now and the students absolutely love her. She is a theorist and a model for counseling person, clinical mental health courses, gathered doctorate degree from [inaudible] University and she’s a former Screen and Stage Actress, I like to tease her. So she’s a very personality, lots of personality. And then the third person joining us is a Dr. Carl Emerson. Her specialty courses are life span development, one of the first one you take. Group counseling, doctorate degree from UNC, Greensborough and she specializes in Stretch Stress Management and Wellness. So that’s all for now from me. Look forward to responding to your questions later this hour. PF can you tell them just a little bit excited about this online program?

Speaker 1: Thank you very much Pamela. Now I will turn you over to Joe Hemerly to talk more about our online learning.

Speaker 3: Thanks Celina. Hey everyone. This is Joe. I am here today to give you a brief preview of Wake Forest Online environment. But before we get into that though I thought I would kind of address a couple of misconceptions about online education and talk a bit more generally about some of the benefits of online education. So the first myth that I’m gonna address here is the myth that online education is isolating. Now to totally understandable why people would think that way, obviously being online you don’t have the same classroom experience that you would have in a traditional setting and you lose those face to face interactions that most of us take for granted. So yeah, there are certainly some challenges presented to students that are on online environment but we’re all familiar with online social media, we all know the tremendous power of the internet can bring people together from all over the world. And technology advances, it seems like the world is only getting smaller. So the online classroom environment is rich with opportunities for interaction. In an online classroom you’ll still have class discussions. You’ll still have projects and things to advance in online collaborative tools. You can even still have the opportunities for face to face interaction with your peers and instructors. In fact since online education takes place entirely outside of the traditional classroom space with all the restrictions that comes with the depth of collaboration possible between students actually becomes greater.

The second myth stems from the notion that online classes are basically correspondence courses. Some people worry that online education basically means just reading from the textbook and then taking a test. But really absolutely nothing can be far from the truth. While textbooks and reading generally play a larger role in delivering content and they might in an undergrad course, your learning will still be supplemented by lectures in the form of presentations, videos, podcasts and written notes. And learning will be facilitated by knowledgeable instructors working for your success. Then more importantly you’ll be connected to your instructor and to your classmates in an online course. Exams come to only part of how we assess student performance. The focus is on assigned or applied challenging and collaborative. You’ll find that the greatest activities [inaudible] diverse if not more diverse than the ones that you would have in a traditional on ground setting.

Now that we addressed myths let’s take a look at what you can expect from your online class. Our distance learning requires, our distance learning program requires internet access only so there’s no particular need for software to access these courses that should be pretty plug and play. Some of the advantages that come from distance learning are flexibility. Now that’s the pretty obvious one. Probably would attract a lot of you to this format of learning. You know you are tied to a specific time of place or a certain day of the week. Your education can take place around your schedule. Yet the flexibility to take your class anywhere that you pick up an internet connection and with instructional strategies like podcast or other mobile rated contents, you have the ability to take your lectures on the go. Detailed instruction, you will receive instructional contents in a variety of ways including podcasts, web resources and interactive flash activities. Not just because you’re not in the classroom doesn’t mean you’re not receiving the same level of instruction that you would. A convenient library of course material, since online education is primarily a synchronized, all instructional material will be stored in a stable environment primitive to you and review at your convenience. Your learning can take place at your pace and they can be accessed anywhere that you can pick up a network connection. Connection and interaction, you can get individualized attention from faculty and develop of close relationships to your fellow learners as you grow into a learning community and it is also an opportunity to expand your professional network with people from all across the country. And finally timely detailed instruction, the course content is continuously being updated. Assignments and discussions encourage you to share the specific issues that you deal with in the work setting and in your personal life and apply those things to the material that you are studying and examining. So that is kind of a brief rundown of some of the benefits you’ll see.

From there let’s take a look at what the online course actually looks like. So if you will bear with me while I switch over to my screen. Panelist Celina is my screen showing up?

Speaker 1: We see it sir. Nice.

Speaker 3: Okay, excellent. All right. So this is Wake Forest Online classroom fixed with Sochi, the learning management system that we’ll be using to take your courses. Before we get into too much detail keep in mind that the courses are currently under development. So you may notice some slight differences between what you see here and what you finally end up taking come fall but in terms of the overall lay out and functionality and all those things this is more or less what you can expect. So I mean I’ll take you through a lot of stuff here very briefly but just remember that you know prior to you beginning your course work you’ll also be enrolled in an orientation course that will give you a more thorough introduction to online learning at Wake Forest and you know basically just kind of you fill in to, into this new online environment.

So along at top here, these tabs represents the different courses that you’re enrolled and we’re gonna take a look at CNS 740 for today. This is one of the foundational courses and the first course that you’re going to take in the program. This menu along the side is the main course navigation. So you’ll use that jump between the different parts of the course. You know some standard components of the course that you can expect to see are for instance the announcements page. This is where your lead and section instructors will direct any important announcement, any reminders or you know notifications or large class communications that are going to be applicable to most students. So you know you wanna check this regularly to make sure there’s nothing important that your instructor wants to remind you of. All courses are going to have a principle still a bit containing all of the important course, policies, and expectations.

But the part of the course you’re probably gonna spend most of your time in will be in the modules section. This contains all of the learning contents and activity interactions. An average week will be set up something like this with the material broken up into distinct lessons. Every week will begin with an overview page and that page will contain a personalized video introduction from the lead instructor. We’ll just kind of give you a brief intro to the topics and goals for the week. Following that overview page you’ll dive right on to the lesson content. Every lesson will begin with kind of introduction with the you know what the lesson is about, the learning objectives and the readings and a brief kind of description of things to pay attention for or how these readings will sort of would fit into your larger learning for the week. After that page we get into the actual meat of the lesson. So this is the instructional content page, instructional content is delivered in a variety of ways throughout the week including text lecture, interactive presentation, podcasts, videos and links to other web resources. This lesson for example you could see we’ve got a little flash activities that’s kind of a brief vocab self-jack and underneath that we have a video that the professor wants to use to kind of introduce you to some of the concepts of counseling.

In order to, oh, next page. Following the instructional content for the lesson you’ll have the learning activities. So here you’ll have discussions, for example this is an introductory discussion and here you have an assignment. As I’ve said before the assignments and learning activities in any given week will be quite varied and you know it looks and beyond just simple quizzes or tests or just handing in a paper. This assignment for example will have you kind of creating brief presentation on important figures in the history of counseling using a program called Voice Thread which is just essentially an online application that makes it easy to share presentation and to even collaborate on various presentations as well. Now in order to participate in these learning activities you have to navigate different areas of the course. So for instance if you want to participate at a discussion you go to the form section. In the form section you’ll see all of the different class forums. So you got class discussion, you got group discussion here for any small activities that you might have. And these are the areas where you’ll kind of interact with your classmates, share ideas and do things like that. You can the descriptions of the different discussions by clicking the show and hide, full description view and to actually participate, you can enter the forum and you’ll see the lists of posts kind of in threaded form. Some courses –

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