Louise Yarnall, Krystal Thomas, Hannah Cheever, and Susan Bickerstaff
January, 2025

College students continue to sign up for online courses at increasing rates, but they also pass them at lower rates than face-to-face courses. To support better outcomes, this paper describes how the Postsecondary Teaching with Technology Collaborative research team leveraged self-directed learning (SDL) concepts to design, develop, and test three instructional strategies for online learning. The team designed the strategies, together called the SDL Instructional Model, so college instructors of gateway science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses could help their students manage online learning.

These strategies evolved from SDL theory and are aligned with a three-part cycle for supporting online students to use productive motivational, metacognitive, and applied learning processes. The strategies support student application of these three processes to manage online learning more effectively and with more confidence.

During summer 2024, the research team engaged nine instructors and their students in three colleges to use all three instructional strategies. This paper shares preliminary feedback from instructors and students on the usability and value of these online strategies and discusses how to promote wider usage by making it easy for instructors to incorporate the strategies into online classes. This paper was shared at the the International Society of Self-Directed Learning Symposium, convening a group of postsecondary practitioners and theorists focused on promoting self-directed lifelong learning to discuss the latest developments and applications of SDL.

Read the paper: Using Self-Directed Learning to Improve Online Learning

 

Categories: Publications Self-Directed Learning