Navigating the Working World with Lifelong Learning
Creighton’s College of Professional and Continuing Education is helping professionals keep up and get ahead in their careers. As the home for adult and professional education at Creighton, the college has launched a new lifelong learning portal for today’s professionals. Dean Gayla Stoner, PhD, shares more about the portal and the future of the college.
Q: Can you tell me about the portal and what it means for adult learners?
The college’s goal was to create a lifelong learning hub for all the University; to address how we might serve adult learners with our college with the support of the other schools and colleges.
With this vision, it was important to have a platform for our offerings. We brought that on in April — lifelong.creighton.edu — the online catalog for Creighton for our non-credit professional development and partnership offerings.
The idea is that anyone — adult learners, alums, working professionals — can go to one place to be able to easily see what offerings we have, register and enroll right there in one spot.
Q: How does the college serve Creighton alumni, non-alumni and other professionals?
We provide professional development, continuing education and workshops for any adult learner to further their education or learn a specific skill or competency. There’s a term ‘upskilling’ — You might have an executive who wants to learn to master a specific skill or expand a skillset. This would be a way to do that. Another avenue we offer is providing continuing education units in a meaningful, high-quality manner.
It truly is about that lifelong education. We recognize that education goes beyond a traditional degree pathway.
Q: What kind of programs are offered by the college?
We’ve created courses and programs that align with our degree programs. For example, offering continuing education units that align directly with the specific disciplines. We have interdisciplinary programs like the newly launched course in health informatics geared toward working professionals in the healthcare field. We’re also getting ready to launch a health law certificate that is being designed and developed by faculty within our School of Law.
We work with our Creighton faculty to design, develop and teach our courses and certificates.
Q: How does Creighton stand out to these prospective learners? Why would they choose Creighton?
That lies within our mission of who we are, that Creighton has high-quality education offerings, rooted in the values of the Jesuit tradition. All our programs are aligned with the mission of the institution. We think about learners who want to enhance their holistic experience and recognize that it is more than just knowledge gain for them, but about who they are as a person. That’s cura personalis. We care very much about our students, and we want to be sure that we’re building leadership for the future.
Q: What do you see as the future of the learning platform: lifelong.creighton.edu?
Over the last couple of years, we have served more than 4,000 learners annually. That was before we created the platform. Now that we have the online platform, we can expand our reach and provide a flexible approach to high-quality education, which means more asynchronous offerings for working professionals to take a course at their own pace, for example.
We are building courses and programs for adult learners that are based on demand, the workforce and specific competencies aligned with specific fields. We’re being very intentional to ensure that the courses are a direct response to what we know their needs are.
Q: How does your personal professional background inform and support this mission of CPCE?
My educational background and passion are in workforce education development, and I’ve worked in higher education for 26 years with corporate experience prior to that.
I’m also a first-generation and non-traditional learner myself. I did not follow a traditional pathway for my own education as I worked full time while I pursued my degree. I think that also brings a personal element of understanding of who our learners are and who they should be.
Visit lifelong.creighton.edu to explore courses and enroll.
