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Accelerate your career with the Educating Adults Graduate Certificate
The Graduate Certificate in Educating Adults is designed for professional development and for individuals seeking to gain specialized competencies in adult learning and corporate talent development. The certificate is applicable to teaching, training, and developing adult learners in multiple settings. Certificate coursework addresses adult learning principles, theory, and techniques to build skills in facilitation, educational offering design, and assessment of learning outcomes.
For-credit
Take just three courses to earn the graduate certificate. Click below to learn more and to apply.
Apply hereNon-credit
Complete these same courses for the certificate without needing to apply. Click below to learn more and register.
Enroll here
Certificate courses
The certificate program consists of the three courses below which may be taken individually. Each course is 10 weeks in duration. To receive the Educating Adults Certificate, you must successfully complete all three courses:
In this course, you will be introduced to major components involved in designing educational offerings for adult learners in various face-to-face settings. You will develop (or revise) a design plan for an educational offering appropriate to your selected adult clientele. You will learn to articulate learning outcomes around which to build your design plan (backward design) and apply theories, concepts, best practices and principles of adult learning while making design decisions. The design principles addressed in this course are also relevant to on-line environments.
In this course, you will develop and hone your skills to facilitate adult learning in a variety of settings. You will learn about concepts that inform learner-centered methods and techniques of facilitating learning. Throughout the course, you will apply various methods and techniques in a variety of settings and reflect on how these methods influence learning. The repertoire of skills you will develop as facilitators of learning may be applied immediately. The concepts, methods, and techniques covered in this course are also relevant to on-line learning.
In this course, you will learn and apply various approaches for assessing learning outcomes of adult students in ways that also contribute to the learning process. The assessment of adult learning entails examining the actual outcomes of learning activities in relation to intended outcomes in order to make determinations about, and continually improve, both student learning and facilitator instructional practices. You will address these components as you develop an assessment plan relevant to your practice setting and gain the skills required to design assessment tools. Throughout the course, you will explore the assessment as a creative, critical, rigorous and reflective process.
Meet your professor
Dr. Susan Neustrom
Dr. Susan Neustrom is a nonprofit executive director, speaker, consultant, and author of “The Comfort Zone Illusion-Leaving Your Comfort Zone is Not So Hard After All”. Susan has more than 25 years of experience in leading personal, professional, and organizational change. She holds an EdD in Organizational Leadership from Argosy University, a MA in Organizational Leadership with a concentration in training and development from Lewis University and a BS in Management from National Louis University.
Hear from students
"For me, the program allowed me to connect my experiences to my learning. As an adult I felt that I was allowed to explore topics and concepts in a more personal way. By doing so, it made me excited to attend class and collaborate with my fellow classmates. These interactions made my learning easier, and I was able to reflect from many different points of view.”
Troy Kindle, Alumnus
"This program teaches much, much more than designing programs, and the program will help anyone who wants to lead, mentor, teach, coach, and develop others, no matter the title. This program is for current and future leaders as much as it is for those who wish to become trainers and teachers. It is a transformative program that has changed my mindset and increased my ability to explain information, encourage connection with the information, and focus on retention of the information through 'aha!' moments."
Barbara Lewis, Alumna
Information sessions
Join us every month for an information session about our graduate program offerings. Click the link below for more information and to sign up for our next information session!
Learn More
Get more information
Complete the form below to receive more information about our certificate programs. If you are a current DePaul graduate student or employee interested in completing this certificate, please email scpsgrad@depaul.edu.
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