Tag: Instructional Strategies

Join us at Achieving the Dream’s annual flagship event, DREAM, for a discussion of technology-enabled instructional strategies designed to grow students’ self-directed learning in online STEM courses.

Online courses have become an increasingly common feature of the higher education landscape, expanding access and offering flexibility for students.

Join us at the AAC&U Conference on Learning and Student Success (CLASS), where we will discuss an ongoing empirical study of self-directed learning support in online courses at community colleges and broad-access universities.

In online courses, students are expected to take more ownership of planning their learning approaches and study methods, organizing their time, seeking help, and following through on coursework. In online STEM courses, these expectations are compounded by disciplinary cultures that have traditionally emphasized meritocracy and competitiveness.

As students increasingly enroll in online postsecondary STEM courses, instructors and students need new strategies to bolster academic success, particularly for students systemically marginalized in STEM and higher education.

Join us at The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) 2024 annual conference for a discussion of instructional strategies used to bolster college students’ abilities to motivate and manage their learning processes.

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.

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.

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.