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Principles of Adult Instruction

Stolovitch and Keeps's principles suggest that the following teaching strategies would be effective and well received by adult students. (The words in parentheses identify the principle involved.)

    Case studies  (Action; experience)     Role playing (Autonomy; experience)
    Simulations (Action)     Self-evaluation (Autonomy)

Well designed case studies, for example, provide engaging vignettes of real-world situations with which the students can identify and for which the subjects under study are clearly relevant. Students are encouraged to augment what they are learning with insights from their own life experience. And since case studies rarely have a single solution, they invite students to define and defend their own conclusions and to reflect on the application of these solutions in their own lives.

Now let's look at how we apply these principles in the context of an online course.

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