Carlton Fong, a professor of curriculum and instruction at Texas State University, has expertise in motivation, metacognition, and instructional design, with a focus on STEM courses. His work on student agency and how it helps students feel connected to college and motivates them to seek help.
We at the Postsecondary Collaborative are extraordinarily grateful to our institutional partners and advisors for your work with us in 2023 to support faculty and students in online STEM courses. We thank you for your continued partnership and inspiration
Scaling evidence-based education technology (edtech) products in the postsecondary market is challenging. Developers need to figure out how to break into classrooms long dominated by commercial publishers – and how to attract funding when investors tend to focus on the much larger and less fragmented K–12 market.
During my first semester at Wake Tech college, I was not well acquainted with resources such as student success coaches, advisors, and tutoring services. However, once I became aware of them and started using them, I discovered how helpful they can be. New college students face a variety of challenges, and one effective way to overcome these hurdles is to seek help.
Being a college student can be hard, especially for first-time students. We tend to think we will have everything together, but we are often wrong. We are starving for the learning we will experience in college, but we don’t quite have all of the study habits or knowledge about how to interact with our instructors that are necessary for us to grow.
The Collaborative has started a fellowship program for students to gain their critical input as the primary users of online learning tools. This input will help the Collaborative ensure our products address the needs of the people and communities most impacted by them.
The ability to manage one’s own learning processes, known as self-directed learning (SDL), is a crucial factor in students’ academic success and one that learning scientists consider being open to improvement.
Online learning is here to stay. The benefits for students—especially increased flexibility and access—can contribute to their academic success. But students also encounter barriers to success, including feeling isolated and being unaware of where and how to seek help.
The term self-directed learning—as we are currently using it within the Postsecondary Collaborative—encompasses an intricate set of mindsets and intrapersonal skills that students use to manage their learning. Though educators and researchers often think of them as discrete skills, we theorize that they are more powerful together than alone.
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that online learning is here to stay, but it also revealed knowledge gaps around how to support all students to learn effectively online. As a result, educators are now highly motivated to develop new models for online teaching and learning that build students’ skills and motivation to learn.