Students feel more empowered and motivated to learn when they have control over aspects of their learning experience. This is especially crucial in higher education, where they must become independent learners – a far cry from anything many have previously experienced in their educational journeys.
Here’s how to embed student autonomy into your teaching and learning.
Strategies to incubate autonomy
Ask students for input regarding course structure, content and assignments
The best way to introduce students to autonomy in their learning is by practising it with them first. Try the following:
A choice in office hours: I send students a survey with a range of days and times to meet with me, rather than dictating the hours and days I am available to them. I then advertise these on the learning management system (LMS) and in class.
Choose your own objectives: if your syllabus allows, have students define some of their own learning objectives. Depending on their interests and career choices, these can serve as segues to deeper learning, while keeping engagement high.
Pre-lecture preparation: ask your students about burning questions or things they want to discuss one or two days before the lecture (via email or LMS announcements) to get an idea of pain points and to foster deeper learning. You can also ask students to prepare a question, quotation and talking point related to your content to lead discussions.
Collaboration their way: create a collaborative live document for students to populate in any format (such as text, drawings or audio) to reflect different ways of learning. In hybrid classes, I ask for student volunteers to act as group chat monitors for online participants with questions and comments. I appoint a monitor for the first few weeks, then students choose the next monitor each week thereafter. To guard against any potential learning loss, I follow this pattern to assign learning partners (fellow students who will share notes and update the monitors on things they might have missed during class) for these monitors initially. I then allow student monitors to choose their own learning partners each week.
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Consulting on assessments: gone are the Sunday 11.59pm deadlines! Instead, I now follow a more student-centred approach by offering students a choice of dates for assessment submission.
I also provide assignment content and format options by allowing students to choose topics or research questions for a final project, and how they present their work (audio, video or written).
For more complex assignments, consider allowing students to fill out a form that asks what they enjoyed or found challenging about assignments before giving them any feedback. Finally, before the semester ends, confirm via a survey (done in or outside class) whether students need dedicated review sessions for “pinch points” before the exam period, and when they would like these to be held.
Peer teaching: create a refresher section for pre- or co-requisite course content on the LMS, and ask whether students want to take on peer teaching roles once they are comfortable with the material.
Give options outside the classroom
Outside class, lecturers can cultivate autonomy in the following ways:
Offer students more immersive study experiences: plug-ins on your LMS, such as H5P on Moodle, foster creativity and experimentation. Web-based resources such as Oppia.org offer interactive maths and science exercises with real-time feedback. Students can use curated libraries or create their own to help them get to grips with challenging concepts.
Indicate required versus additional readings: by making this distinction, students can choose how much to engage with course content outside scheduled lecture time.
Suggest weekly rotating discussions: for asynchronous content reflection, allow students to lead discussions on a different topic each week. Let them choose the moderator, as well as the requirements (if any) for posting in the discussion thread. Encourage the moderator to summarise and highlight strong posts during closing discussions each week.
Create an online forum for non-linear reflections on learning: do this by adding an e-learning portfolio to the LMS to document key skills learned. Students can contribute as much or as little to this as they like. They can set these up themselves on external platforms too, such as Wix or WordPress. Not only does this build autonomy, it also creates a bank of material from which students can draw during job interviews.
Building autonomy is a necessary part of a student’s academic journey, allowing them to become well-adjusted members of the university community and broader society. By introducing choice, you’ll be aiding them in both their educational and personal development journeys.
Natalie K. D. Seedan is sports sciences laboratory technician and part-time lecturer at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus.
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