The Einhorn Center for Community Engagement has launched a set of comprehensive online courses on the best practices of community-engaged learning, in partnership with eCornell. Developed by Richard Kiely, the Einhorn Center’s director of academic initiatives, and Amy Newman, senior lecturer of management communication at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, with substantial support from eCornell’s instructional design team, the self-paced courses are available free of charge to members of the Cornell community and as a paid version to the public at large.
As community-engaged learning (CEL) — learning that takes place in and with communities — increasingly becomes part of classrooms, research and co-curricular programs across campus, “our goal is to make sure that faculty, staff and students are prepared to engage with partners and organizations,” Kiely said. “Working with real people and problems outside the classroom is complex and difficult. So, the five courses are designed to speak to not only the learning outcomes CEL students achieve but also to co-designing community-engaged learning and research with community partners, so they are collaborative and mutually beneficial.”
The program’s five courses are based on seminars Kiely previously piloted with faculty in the College of Human Ecology as part of the Einhorn Center’s Engaged College Initiative. Each course offers three modules as well as several tools, activities and exercises highlighting various aspects of CEL, including: focus on a community-identified interest or problem; mutually beneficial partnerships and co-education; cultural humility; critical reflection; and engaged leadership.
Over 100 videos feature faculty, students and community partners who have participated in community-engaged learning, representing the collective knowledge and experience of diverse campus and community stakeholders and serving as a kind of textbook illuminating key principles and practices in designing high-quality community-engaged learning experiences, Kiely said.
There are several versions of the CEL courses. One is intended for faculty and academic staff who want to create a course or program with a community-engaged learning component. Additionally, a student-centric version — aimed at those leading a registered student organization, taking a CEL course or working as a course assistant — serves as a complementary workbook that can also lead to a certificate for completing all five courses. Additionally, there’s a paid program for organizations outside of Cornell that Kiely hopes will be useful to community partners or leaders in higher education, non- or for-profit organizations. All versions can be used flexibly. “We want everyone to pick and choose the elements that fit their needs or incorporate their own ideas and adaptations,” Kiely said.
The leadership team of the Dyson Grand Challenges program — a four-year, community-engaged learning program required of all students in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management (AEM) — did just that. Both Sarah Wolfolds and Lisa Gerber, the program’s academic director and program manager, respectively, took part in the Einhorn Center’s Engaged Faculty Fellowship program in 2023–24 and completed a precursor to the course.
“We wanted our students to understand why this work mattered and to have a shared language around it,” said Gerber. She and Wolfolds incorporated exercises from the eCornell course into a third-year pre-project course and a team-based capstone project course (AEM 3000 and AEM 4000). “The tools in the program — such as stakeholder maps or how to do an organizational scan — are beautifully formatted, so I would curate them and put them directly into my Canvas course,” Wolfolds said.
Leveraging the Einhorn Center’s resources “has been a huge help to us,” Gerber said. She and Wolfolds hope the eCornell course may do the same for other instructors across Cornell. “It’s hard to fit more material into a 14-week semester, but the tools lower the barriers for faculty who want to include community engagement in their courses,” Wolfolds said.
Soon, faculty will be able to look to work by Stefan Ivanovski for further guidance. The third-year graduate student at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations took the eCornell course as part of the Community-Engaged Learning and Teaching Facilitators Program last year. “I find it useful that it gives you the full spectrum of possible opportunities and challenges of community-engaged learning and what we as facilitators should double-down on or should be careful to avoid,” he said.
Ivanovski is currently preparing a case study on AEM 3260/5260, a cross-listed undergraduate/graduate CEL course on cooperative business management taught by Todd M. Schmit, professor in the Dyson School. “My objective is to help other faculty members at Cornell and beyond in designing their own community-engaged learning courses or convert their existing ones,” Ivanovski explained. “The case study will be done in the format of a blog post, which will make it easy to consume and distribute broadly.”
Over the course of the spring semester, the Einhorn Center is offering workshops related to the eCornell course.
Olivia M. Hall is a freelance writer for the Einhorn Center.