A report on online learning based on responses from chief learning officers released last month found that a large majority of respondents (roughly three-quarters of the 324 leaders surveyed) have seen increasing demand for online options from students who are learning on campus. The ninth annual “Changing Landscape of Online Education” report also noted that online sections of courses typically fill first, and that nearly half of the respondents (46%) said that online program enrollment is outpacing general enrollment growth in on-campus programs at their institutions.
While some of our community colleges have seen some slowing of that demand for online courses post-pandemic, we have to recognize that online learning in many forms will continue to be a large part of our educational landscape and will have significant implications for our work around strengthening teaching and learning and accelerating equitable student success outcomes.
The Postsecondary Teaching with Technology Collaborative — led by the Community College Research Center and SRI Education in partnership with Achieving the Dream and nine broad-access public colleges and universities across the United States, including a number of Achieving the Dream network colleges — has been seeking to improve our knowledge of how college and university instructors can effectively use technology to help students develop self-directed learning skills (SDL) in online courses. The collaborative works with students, faculty, technology developers and other researchers and offers some important insights about how institutions of higher education can strengthen their supports for students in mastering SDL skills, which include attitudes and dispositions (e.g., motivation) and learning skills (e.g., planning, help-seeking and reflection) that help students learn and succeed in online courses.
A look at the landscape
An April 2024 brief from the Postsecondary Teaching with Technology Collaborative examines how implementing an SDL framework can address the challenges students face in taking online courses, particularly online science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses, where students experience especially low success rates. According to the brief, one study found that rates of course completion for students taking online STEM courses were almost 20% lower than rates for students taking in-person STEM courses, which underscores the need for improving online course delivery.
The brief notes that addressing the development of SDL skills can influence students’ ability to pass key courses that are requirements for success in programs such as nursing, allied health, computer technology, and other fields that can lead to good jobs and economic mobility.
Meanwhile, a longer report examines how, during the pandemic, faculty and staff at seven community colleges and two broad-access universities offered supports for students to strengthen their SDL skills.
While the researchers found that most colleges strengthened online learning environments through technology infrastructure investments and faculty and student supports, they also found persistent challenges including:
- Poorer student performance in online course sections
- Lack of meaningful communication and engagement
- Lower likelihood for online students to seek help when they need it
- Increased demands for students to apply crucial self-directed learning skills such as time and task management
And while most faculty saw these skills as important, “explicit instructional support for SDL skills inside classrooms appeared to be limited and uneven,” the report says.
Six things to consider
Clearly, our institutions need to champion self-directed learning skill development and integrate comprehensive SDL supports into our teaching and learning efforts. That starts with building an awareness of this research and the implications for investments in supports for faculty, students and staff among our leadership and administrative teams.
My organization, Achieving the Dream (ATD), has worked with our network colleges on different aspects of online learning and better integrating technology into more student-centered teaching and learning. Efforts, such as our work around open educational resources and adopting adaptive courseware in introductory courses through the Every Learner Everywhere initiative, offer important lessons to consider as we think about building SDL skills and knowledge into our courses and professional learning.
Here are six things we learned that matter:
- Institutional policies, funding and administrative leadership. While faculty need to play a leadership role in professional learning for SDL, to implement these efforts at scale requires leadership from the top. This includes demonstrating and communicating an explicit commitment to:
- Prioritize SDL strategies in instructional initiatives.
- Incorporate support of SDL in strategic and academic plans.
- Provide funding and staff resources.
- Communicate to faculty exactly what resources are available.
- Development of organizational infrastructure to support professional learning for scaling adoption of innovations like open educational resources (OER), adaptive courseware or SDL. The infrastructure can include structured professional learning opportunities, support for attendance at conferences, and alignment of the priorities with tenure and other evaluation requirements. Centers for Teaching and Learning can be central players in creating faculty-led, flexible professional learning activities that support SDL adoption. When these centers are truly faculty-led, they become key places for facilitating grassroots faculty adoption of SDL. We also must find ways to recognize and reward faculty efforts in instructional innovation.
- Integrating SDL into course content. We need to get past what I feel is often our default approach to incorporating SDL into the student experience — developing a student success course as the sole answer. We can scale SDL by tailoring it to specific content areas or course modalities, which requires leaders to offer time, space and resources to faculty to integrate SDL skills in classrooms. We also must encourage faculty to take responsibility for teaching SDL skills; it’s not a job that should be left to others, or to students themselves.
- Faculty workload. At the same time, we need to recognize that faculty workload balancing issues are real and can’t be ignored. We continue to invest in research on effective practices like SDL, but to make the research actionable, we must design SDL initiatives that provide faculty with the necessary resources and support to integrate SDL into practices without adding to their burden.
- Integrating SDL with the college’s technology strategy. We learned through our work on adaptive learning platforms that students were able to navigate the technology more effectively when there was a clear connection with the college’s learning management system so that students didn’t feel like they were jumping from platform to platform. There is a big opportunity here to support SDL adoption and scaling by leveraging technology, perhaps including elements of AI.
- Connecting SDL to an equity agenda. When administrators identified equity as a focus of their OER initiatives (though most associated equity with access and cost savings), there was stronger adoption. I see that same possibility here. Namely, if the institution connects a comprehensive SDL strategy with their overall student success goals and a commitment to providing all students with the ability to coordinate the three major components of SDL (motivational processes, meta-cognitive processes and applied learning processes), more marginalized students will succeed. Therefore, I see universal and scaled adoption of an SDL strategy as an equity strategy.
In their efforts to establish and deepen cultures of excellence in teaching and learning on their campuses, many ATD colleges are working to introduce research-informed, high-impact practices, such as culturally responsive teaching, through robust professional learning efforts. Some institutions are requiring that faculty adopt and integrate high-impact practices into their course design. Ultimately, we must think of SDL as one of these high-impact practices so that it becomes pervasive across the institution and touches every student. We can do this by attending to the things we know matter.
