Guidelines and strategies for fostering and enhancing self-directed online learning

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to provide practical instructional design strategies to foster and enhance learners’ online self-directed learning skills and abilities; especially when accessing massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other forms of open educational resources and OpenCourseWare (OCW). In addition to attempting to understand self-directed online learning, a series of studies was conducted to explore how to motivate learners and enhance students’ self-management and self-monitoring skills in MOOCs. This article offers 15 practical guidelines for fostering learners’ self-directed online learning (SDOL) based on the authors’ past research, including extensive literature reviews, surveys, dozens of MOOC instructor and learner interviews, and many course content analyses. Detailed explanations and examples are provided to help readers understand each of the 15 individual strategies. It is hoped that these instructional design guidelines will be adopted by instructional designers of MOOCs as well as practitioners in their MOOC teaching practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-directed learning
• online learning
• motivation
• massive open online course
• MOOCs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical compliance

This research is in compliance with Ethical Standards.

Additional information

Funding

This research was not funded personally or by any institution.

Notes on contributors

Meina Zhu

Meina Zhu is an Assistant Professor in the Learning Design and Technology program in the College of Education at Wayne State University. Her research interests include online education, self-directed learning, Open education, STEM education, learning analytics, and emerging learning technologies. She can be reached at [email protected]

Curtis J. Bonk

Curtis J. Bonk is Professor in the School of Education at Indiana University (IU), teaching psychology and technology courses, and Adjunct in the School of Informatics at IU. He is a former software entrepreneur, certified public accountant, corporate controller, and educational psychologist who presently is an educational technologist, award-winning writer, highly published researcher, statewide and national awardee in innovative teaching with technology, and internationally acclaimed presenter. Curt is the author of nearly 400 publications and has given close to 2,000 talks around the world. In 2020, Curt was awarded the IU President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning Technology and in 2021, he received the David H. Jonassen Excellence in Research Award. Recently, the American Educational Research Association named him a 2022 AERA Fellow for his exceptional contributions to, and excellence in, education research, and the following week, he was honoured with the International Engagement award from the IU School of Education. He co-hosts the weekly award-winning podcast show, Silver Lining for Learning (https://silverliningforlearning.org/). He can be contacted at [email protected] and his homepage is http://curtbonk.com/.