KO Student Earns GOA Global Learning Certificate

Ana Tippner ’ 24 received a Global Online Academy Global Learning Certificate.  Kingswood Oxford is a member of Global Online Academy (GOA), a consortium of 63 schools worldwide. GOA offers courses that are a supplement to KO’s curriculum. To earn a certificate, a student must pass three classes across different fields of study.

Tippner completed Introduction to Legal Thinking, Medical Problem Solving, and Personal Finance. Through these courses, Tippner mastered several competencies, including identifying and analyzing issues, communicating, collaborating, and empathizing with individuals with different points of view and experiences, learning independently, and developing fluency with personal finance strategies and concepts. 

“I always wanted to go into the legal field and be a prosecutor,” she said, “and I wanted to test the waters to see if this was something I liked. It turned out that I really enjoyed it.”

The semester classes are 14 weeks long, and the summer classes have the same amount of content compressed into seven weeks. She felt the legal course was a time-consuming but rewarding experience filled with research and writing briefs. The class included learning about various kinds of law, including Sharia Law, which gave her tremendous perspective and overview of the legal field. 

In addition to learning content, GOA provides other learning opportunities for students personally. “I learned a lot about collaboration,” she said. “Connecting online is hard, but the Covid experience helped me adapt. Without a pandemic, I wouldn’t have been as successful in connecting with people.” That is truly looking at the bright side!

Another personal lesson Tippner learned was improving her time management. Because GOA is asynchronous, she said all the work is on your own time. “You need to plan out when you need to do things and plan it out in advance,” she said, “especially because the due dates don’t necessarily change to your time zone.”

Tippner is taking a GOA Global Health course to learn how public policy impacts worldwide health. She wants to encourage other KO students to embrace a GOA class. “The classes are really rewarding, she said. “If there’s something that you’re interested in that is highly specific that KO wouldn’t offer, you should check it out. You’ll find out if this is a subject you’ll want to pursue in the future.”