INTRODUCTION Two rising forces in higher education around the world have shifted the work we do – the commodification of higher education and an increased focus on technology-enhanced learning. The focus often shifts to authentic learning and online and blended learning. The challenge is to bring authentic learning into an online or blended classroom in ways to enhance student participation and motivation in a course, especially when many of our online students are practitioners themselves. This presentation introduces a model for integrating community partnerships and practitioners into higher education through technology, the Technology-Enhanced Community (TEC) Partnership Model. The explanation of the model is based around an online Human Rights Education (HRE) course. We describe the experiences and impact from the perspectives of the partnership, and we provide examples from the HRE course to show the model in practice. We also provide an overview of the strategies to incorporate similar partnerships and collaborations among students, student-practitioners, and practitioners in the field. The Human Rights Education course was originally designed for practitioners in K-12 education and community-based organizations who wish to learn about human rights, Human Rights Education, and how to become advocates for human rights in their professions. In practice, the course appeals to a wide audience of students, including K-12 and higher education professionals, nurse educators, community practitioners, and undergraduate and graduate students from a variety of disciplines. One of the main tenets of Human Rights Education is that it is participant-guided and context-driven. As such, the instructors create an authentic HRE experience for students by bringing in as many real-life experiences of HRE advocates and practitioners from around the world as possible. They use many different technologies to do so. THEORETICAL CONTEXT Helping students learn and discover by connecting to a community of practice is certainly not a new concept in education. The apprenticeship model was a common method dating back to the Middle Ages to help young children acquire a particular craft. As the importance of learning a particular proficiency ebbed toward a need for a more broad-based, general knowledge, John Dewey (1916) stressed the role of education as “a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process” to help students discover how connected we are to each other in our “social environment.” Then, in the late 1980s and the early 1990s the importance of cognitive apprenticeships emerged. Experts Lave and Wenger (1992) stressed the importance of situated learning as a process whereby novice learners integrate by establishing “legitimate peripheral participation” by learning from the experts within that community (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Lave & Wenger, 1992). Next, the National and Community Service Act of 1990 authorized the Learn and Serve America grant program, which introduced the concept of service learning. Administrators often stress the importance of faculty integrating service learning into academic coursework as means of higher education giving back to the community. Though seemingly the Deweyan ideal, the risk is that the community needs do not always align with the course learning outcomes, and, unfortunately, course outcomes may be sacrificed to achieve the service. To ease this tension, other experts have proposed moving toward a problem-based learning or authentic learning model where students resolve a problem faced in industry (Barron, 1998; Herrington & Oliver, 2000; Herrington, Oliver, & Reeves, 2003). We promote a unique model of integrating practitioners into technology-rich academic course communities where the focus is on learning with the community members, rather than doing something for them (Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2000). In our TEC Partnership Model, we merge the concepts of service learning with authentic learning (Lave & Wenger, 1992; Wenger, 1998; Barab, Squire, & Dueber, 2000; Lombardi, 2007) in a technology-rich environment to show how different levels of engagement with community experts can both contribute to and extend course objectives and learning outcomes as well as students’ levels of engagement and intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985). As Lombardi (2007) notes, “Only in the past few years have educational researchers begun to propose project after project aimed at moving these class-bound exercises into the immersive, online realm, where students can try on varying perspectives and work in tandem with peers, mentors, and potential employers who may live continents away” (p. 15). We value the intersection between Lombardi’s learner-centered authentic approach and meaningful, technical-enhanced learning. THE TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED COMMUNITY (TEC) PARTNERSHIP MODEL Our Technology-Enhanced Community (TEC) Partnership Model provides structure to the integration of practitioners into technology-rich academic course communities. There are three levels of interaction in the Technology-Enhanced Community (TEC) Partnership Model: Sharing of Content, Interaction with Students, and Partnership in Course Community. Each level will be described with examples from the Human Rights Education course, which illustrates how technology can enhance the connections and collaboration among community practitioners and students. We also will provide factors and strategies to consider when incorporating these levels and various technologies into courses. Community resource professionals can be a great asset to any course, especially courses with students who are practitioners or courses where students are preparing to work in a specific field of practice. Students in these courses often expect and demand authentic activities and content relevant to their immediate needs of practice. Utilizing the three levels of the Technology-Enhanced Community (TEC) Partnership Model can help instructors in strategic incorporation of community resource professionals into a course. In this way, we extend the concept of learning in a community of practice to include the authentic voices of practitioners in the field through technology-enhanced learning. As one of the students in the Human Rights Education course reflected at the end of the course, “The course was an excellent blend of ‘learning’ in the … sense of just taking in new information and actually thinking about and beginning to apply what [Human Rights Education] can look like in our real lives.” These authentic learning experiences are in demand in higher education today, and the Technology-Enhanced Community (TEC) Partnership Model provides guidance to instructors looking for ways in which to combine authentic practice with learning technologies and online and hybrid course offerings.
