Educational Planning Course Basics

Who takes an Educational Planning Course?

You may take an educational planning course if you are designing an individualized degree, one listed on the page on Individualized Degree Design.

Individualized degrees have some flexibility in that you have choice in how to fulfill the knowledge foundations for your degree.

An Educational Planning course provides a structured way of working with your mentor/advisor to make sure that your individualized course choices logically fulfill those knowledge foundations.

Why Educational Planning?

You may have come to ESU with bits and pieces of degrees and prior learning – pieces that have to fit together coherently within the context of the required foundational knowledge for your area of study.

Also, the process of developing the degree is as important as the final products. You will explore what you have already accomplished toward your degree, what you need to accomplish, where you want to go, and what it takes to get there.

Finally, learning occurs most fully when a learner invests personally in the learning process. Investigating your goals is one of the usual investigations in an educational planning course.

Content of Educational Planning Courses

You enroll in and get credit for an educational planning course because course choice and degree design are not necessarily simple processes. They may involve researching:

• your short- and long-term goals
• what the foundational knowledge areas required for your degree actually mean, and what they might include
• the skills and knowledge currently expected of a college graduate in your professional area, or for a professional certification
• graduate programs’ prerequisites if your undergraduate degree is a step toward a graduate degree
• what’s involved in credit for prior learning and how to create individualized prior learning requests
• your own skills and abilities to succeed academically and professionally
• and more…

Educational Planning courses guide you through relevant research so that you can make informed decisions about your degree path and its contents.

Different Educational Planning Courses

There are four different educational planning courses whose outcome is a degree plan and a rationale essay that explains your choices in your degree:

• EDPL 1005 – Educational Planning, 2 cr. introductory level
• EDPL 1010 – Educational Planning, 4 cr. introductory level
• EDPL 3005 – Educational Planning, 2 cr. advanced level
• EDPL 3010 – Educational Planning, 4 cr. advanced level

Why are there different credit amounts for Educational Planning Courses?

There are different credit amounts for educational planning courses for two reasons:

1. college policy
2. student and mentor/advisor preference

College Policy

College policy for Individualized Program: Educational Planning states that you need two credits of educational planning for an individualized associate degree and four credits for an individualized bachelor’s degree.

Everyone doing an individualized associate or bachelor’s degree does two credits of educational planning with their mentor/advisor in one of the four courses listed above.

Student and Mentor/Advisor Preference

For the other two of the four educational planning credits, students and mentors/advisors have two options:

1. They can work together to do supportive investigations into professional requirements, skills, prior learning, and more in the four-credit educational planning course.
2. Students can opt to do a two-credit course in an area that supports planning and succeeding with your degree.  These courses can be found in the Term Guide and Catalog by choosing the attribute “educational planning.” You will find courses such as Prior Learning Assessment, 21st Century Careers, Exploring the Professions: Children and Childcare, Effective Academic Writing, Learning Styles, and more.

Results of Educational Planning

The products of the two credits of Educational Planning required for every individualized degree – the results of your research and informed decisions – are:

• a degree plan mapping out the rest of your courses with Empire, chosen based on your goals, research, and knowledge foundations for your degree
• a rationale essay explaining how your course choices both support your goals and fulfill the required knowledge foundations in your area of study, for your type of degree