Building Community-Engaged Learning into the Online Political Science Classroom

Translating community engagement activities from face-to-face courses, where students share a common space and community, to online courses, which lack a shared place, is challenging. This paper presents two approaches that have been used to successfully connect online undergraduate students to their communities and increase their level of civic engagement. Both of these approaches focus on building attachment to place as an alternative to service learning that leads to higher civic engagement. The success of these approaches in terms of student satisfaction and learning outcome attainment also demonstrates how alternatives to service-learning based civic engagement efforts in online classrooms can be more attainable and accessible for online students and for non-traditional students.