How to Facilitate Effective Online Learning Environments

Marni Baker Stein, Provost and Chief Academic Officer, Western Governors University

At the core of every higher education institution is a mission to serve the student. Many student services and programs are standard at traditional on ground universities with a primary focus on health and safety through on-campus health centers; on-campus mental health services; on-campus security, police and emergency management services; and on-campus community events.

Over the last few years, these same universities have begun launching online programs to allow greater accessibility to students who want and need a degree, but who must balance that need with busy lives as working professionals and caretakers for their families. As these online programs grow, and students are dispersed across much broader geographical areas, their needs are often different than the traditional on-campus student and serving the challenges impacting their progress much more complex.

While traditional universities have an impressive set of student resources and services at their brick-and-mortar locations, one question must be asked—How are these emerging providers of online education proactively and effectively supporting learners who represent a very different use-case for support?

At Western Governors University, the nation’s largest nonprofit online institution, we began considering this question 25 years ago when we enrolled our first degree-seeker, and our service model has grown and evolved alongside our student body - which presently exceeds over 130,000 full-time students nationwide. As is true for many universities, the success of each one of our students is at the heart of our mission and you can imagine, with our learning community spread across all 50 states, this commitment can be quite a challenge. Yet, through time and experience, we have found that not only is it possible to serve our learners well, but our digital environment also affords us many advantages in meeting our learners where they are and in serving them just-in-time with what they need to reach their goals.

One such advantage is WGU’s Environmental Barriers program, also known as EVB. The program is a unique and innovative emergency management team that monitors potential environmental impacts across the country and reaches out to students within affected geographies to offer personalized support and resources.

The EVB team monitors potential student-impacting events daily, reviewing natural disaster, severe weather, public safety, and pandemic events across the country. The team categorizes each event to determine impact severity and uses geo-mapping tools to identify student addresses within an incident’s area. The goal is to help minimize the barrier to their success and provide integrated and individualized support as part of WGU’s online community of care.

Beginning in 2015 with a small unit under WGU’s Assessment Services, the EVB team fully launched in 2017 in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Since then, the EVB Program, supported by WGU faculty and staff nationwide, has served more than 220,000 cases related to potentially impacted students living through community disasters.

“Colleges and universities expanding their online programming to remote learner-audiences should consider how they will respond to personal environmental impacts for their digital populations as they grow, just as they do with their on-ground students.”

During COVID-19 alone, over 177,000 records were created between March 2020 and March 2022 due to varying levels of student impact, ranging from very minimal impact to major impacts - including loss of life, and nearly 6,000 students who experienced either temporary displacement or permanent home loss from pandemic-related and adjacent events.

The EVB program supports students in several ways, including:

· Monitoring counties across the country twice daily for new potential natural disasters, public safety, or major community events to proactively identify students that may need assistance.

· Reaching out to students directly by email to check in when a new, potentially impactful event has occurred in their community.

· Notifying the student’s Program Mentor when a new event occurs so that the Program Mentor can reach out and provide individualized support to students.

· Monitoring students potentially impacted by an event through a regularly scheduled audit process to ensure no student falls through the cracks and receives expanded support as needed.

· Collaborating with Financial Services, Financial Aid, the Office of the Registrar, faculty members and additional Student Support Services teams to ensure highly impacted students are receiving any potential student interventions.

Early communication and a compassionate offering of support to students potentially impacted by a disaster improves their overall resilience and sense of connection that are vital to a successful recovery from a disruptive event. Analyses from the initial 18 months of the Covid-19 pandemic event, show that students who received contact from mentors and other interventions as part of the EVB program at WGU were 14percent more likely to continue their studies than those who did not receive any type of intervention.

This program proved to be especially valuable during the pandemic in supporting our students, particularly those in the College of Health Professions, many of whom are actively employed as healthcare workers. WGU educates more licensed nurses annually—including 17,500 undergraduate students in the 2021 academic year alone—than any other institution domestically. Early in the pandemic, health professions students struggled with balancing the extreme demands of professional, personal, and academic responsibilities. During this time, WGU implemented the EVB process with a specific eye on the challenges impacting the nation’s healthcare workforce to evaluate how we could best support students who were experiencing these industry sector-specific challenges.

The EVB protocol, Reach-Assess-Assist, is a straightforward process that is also enriched with qualitative data to help the team to assess and respond to impacts across 16 categories, such as “illness” and “loss of employment” which identifies trends (severity of impact, types of barriers/hardships students face, geo-specific hotspots, etc.) and positions staff and faculty members to quickly respond.

Colleges and universities expanding their online programming to remote learner-audiences should consider how they will respond to personal environmental impacts for their digital populations as they grow, just as they do with their on-ground students. Not only are such efforts necessary to support effective and healthy and productive online learning environments, at WGU we also believe that as online service providers we all have a moral obligation to help students stay on their pathway to success, regardless of the modality of their learning.

Financial

Healthcare

Public Safety

Emergency Management