When I attended the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s annual meeting in January of 2008, I was sitting in a general session, and I was thinking to myself about online education and what students ‘do’ in that environment. I then got to thinking about service-learning and how authentic, situational, and service-based assignments can be of great value to students.

All of that led to the thought that, for the most part, online learning and service-learning seem to be mutually exclusive. The question is, do they have to be?

To see what has been done in this arena, I did a search and found an article, a case study, from the EDMEDIA conference in 2002. Lesa Lorenzen Huber from Indiana University, in her paper titled “The Human Touch: Incorporating Service-Learning into an Online Course,” discusses an instance where she took on the challenge of incorporating service-learning into her online course. This was filled with a great number of challenges but also had a lot of rewards.

Let’s take a step back and establish the essence of service learning. According to Learn and Serve America’s National Service-Learning Clearinghouse, “service-learning is a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.” In the case of Huber’s experience, the service-learning component was to have the students serve the community by working with new, elderly residents in the area and to welcome them to the community.

Huber also had four features she wanted to be sure were included in her course, as they are important elements of any service-learning course:

1. Service is clearly connected to the academic component and treated as a text via readings, discussion, speakers, etc.
2. A reciprocal relationship between the university and the community makes each a partner in the education of students.
3. Service meets a genuine community need as defined by the community-based organization.
4. 4. The philanthropic and civic content of the students’ service is discussed and examined. It is the practice of citizenship, broadly defined, that distinguishes service-learning from practica or internships, which focus more on professional preparation.

These elements can directly lead to a rewarding student experience. However, in an online course, it becomes difficult to incorporate the element of service. How are such service projects set up with so many different communities interfacing at once? How are the variables controlled in order for service to be a ‘learning text’ when students come from different areas? How do you build a reciprocal relationship between the university and many communities?

Despite these concerns, Huber proceeded with her course. It wasn’t easy. “At the beginning of the fall semester I had decided this type of model to increase student involvement in a human services online course was just too problematic.”[i] Through the term, though, she received such overwhelming positive feedback from the students that she reconsidered.

In online courses, students often report feeling isolated while taking the class. Service-learning is one way to fix that problem. While they may not physically see their classmates, they will get out in the community and put into practice skills they are learning in the course and can then come back to the online class and discuss their individual experiences. This leads to a rich community interaction as well as a rich online discussion and interactions between students.

Expectations of online courses also become a factor. By and large, most online courses require a student only to log in to the computer and participate online or read a textbook in addition to writing papers. Online learning does not have to equate to computer-only learning. Courses can require the students to go out and complete a project, interview people, or do other types of assignments involving time and work away from the computer. Service-learning takes this to the next level, as the work outside the class and away from the Internet is not only an assignment but also a form of the text and an integral part of the course.

Service-learning courses are not easy to construct; nor are effective online courses. To combine the two together makes the creation of such a course even more challenging; however, with the greater obstacles come greater rewards and, in the end, more comprehensive and significant student learning. It is because of this that faculty should consider incorporating service-learning into their online courses and that the two do not need to be mutually exclusive.

[i] Huber, L. (2002). The Human Touch: Incorporating Service-Learning into an Online Course. In P. Barker & S. Rebelsky (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2002 (pp. 1164-1169). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.