Who's in Charge? A System of Scaffolds That Encourages Online Learners to Take Control

The teaching and learning “dance” is one that traditionally has been led by the instructor with the student following passively. Faculty members in higher education are entering the realm of online learning, many with the previous experience and hopes of facilitating student-centered, active learning experiences. However, due to factors that are integral to this environment, many are returning to their “comfort zones” by providing greater clarity and specificity, stricter accountability measures, and less student flexibility/personalization. To address best teaching practices in adult education within the online environment, a systems model of social, self-direction is presented that allows the student to “lead” and yet learn how to facilitate the self-direction process. This model was used as an instructional intervention in this study, which sought to answer the question: “What are the self-perceived learning gains of students engaged in a social, self-directed learning experience?” A self-rated pre-test/post-test design was utilized with the 8 course sections and 112 subjects that received this instructional intervention. Other data sources were also utilized as triangulation for validating the self-reported learning gains on both the breadth and depth of course material. The model was found to facilitate significant learning gains, while attending to university guidelines and course requirements. Further implications and questions that are resulting from this research are also explored. Introduction Online learning can be overwhelming and discombobulating for learners due to uncertainty and lack of clearly expressed expectation. However, in response to student requests for clarity in online environments, structure has been created by assuming a more rigid classroom approach that eliminates many of the benefits of virtual instruction. Rather than assuming new and innovative ways to respond to demands of online education, the trend is to assign quotas, dates, and accountability measures that min imize choice and encourage students to become the type of students that Ponticell and Zapeda (2004) term “compliant learners”. This was substantiated in many presentations at a recent national leadership conference where faculty shared innovations in program development and course delivery via online environments. Traditional approaches of lecture, readings, and testing do not successfully accommodate the best practices of higher education/adult education, which encourage active, engaged, and authentic learning experiences. Knowles’ work provides a definition of adragogy and self-direction that can be used as a theoretical basis for incorporating adult learning principles into higher educational teaching practice (Knowles, 1975; Knowles, 1986; Knowles, Ho lton, & Swanson, 1998). The attributive, representative, and situational theoretical philosophies have been posited within the adult education field as different yet critical teaching and learning perspectives and are usually explored as divergent instructional methods. The model presented in this research integrates all three models to attend to learner characteristics (input attributive variables), process and meaning construction (process representative variables), and socially contextual interaction (process learning community, self and group metacognition, and outcome environmental variables) (McGough, 2003). While these practices are important regardless of educational delivery, the advent of online mediums has provided a platform for the exploration of innovative teaching models and an adaptation of “instructor” and/or “student” roles (Harvey, 2002; Jonassen, 2002; Moller, 2002). Aligning instructional approaches so that online experiences provide both clearly expressed structure and a means for personal learning that incorporates self-direction, metacognition, and learning communities is not an easy linear task. Instead, learning in this framework must be viewed as a complex system where students are granted responsibility for planning, searching, finding and producing learning objectives, while instructors provide the scaffolds, resources, feedback, and expertise that is essential to connect system components. Within this framework, learning becomes an instructional dance, where students lead mo vements, direction, and pace while instructors follow in step, provide assistance, and enhance the experience. So the question, “Who’s in