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.
Pima Community College in Arizona is a Hispanic-serving institution that enrolls about 43,000 students, many of whom are working and have families. With 40% of students fully online, and more in virtual and hybrid courses, the college ensures that online courses are not just pale imitations of in-person courses and that their design takes into account how students learn.
In 2020, Macomb Community College combined the college’s academic literacy and writing center and academic content tutoring center under one administrative team, allowing the college to reimagine tutoring services to better meet the needs of our students enrolled in remote, online, hybrid, and in-person courses. This shift—combined with the educational impacts we observed from COVID-19—encouraged us to apply what we had learned in working with students on reading and writing to other disciplines such as math, business, and physics and to develop new ways to support self-regulated learning across disciplines.
Montgomery College in Maryland serves 50,000 students on three campuses and has offered courses online for more than a decade. To reach their online students, the college created the Virtual Campus to bring comprehensive support services under one digital roof.
Community colleges, HBCUs, and other broad access institutions face pressing challenges related to enrollments, equity, and preparing students for citizenship and meaningful careers. Faculty are key to solving all these challenges.
When college students take courses online, technology is only one of many challenges that they must navigate to successfully engage in and complete a course.
Some skills can be learned and coached, but not taught. Instruction about skills like leadership, creativity, and self-directed learning reduces them to a formulaic recipe that the learner follows, without mastering the essential capabilities of recognizing the unique characteristics of a particular situation and of improvising an approach suited to the occasion.
In spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic compelled colleges and universities to quickly move their courses online—despite evidence that students are less likely to complete and get good grades in online courses as compared to in-person learning.
Welcome to the Collaborative’s new blog! This blog is one way we will foster conversation around the many complex issues around self-directed learning.