We have seen a substantial shift to a more holistic approach in supporting post-traditional online learners. Remote operations during the COVID pandemic pushed institutions to find new ways to deliver support and meet the needs of diverse learners at a distance. Even on campuses that returned fairly rapidly to campus-based operations, many services remained hybrid. We could see that our ideas about which students wanted or needed which kinds of support and access could sometimes be arbitrary.
Students in online programs took remote courses that had never been accessible to them before. Campus students used remote services for the career center. Student organizations held virtual meetings and found they had more participation in some events when the event could be accessed online. These outcomes brought visibility to both students’ needs and institutions’ capacity to connect with and support students in ways that previously seemed impossible.
As campus services transitioned back to pre-COVID operational models, many across institutional communities have resisted the old models and advocated for an expanded view of supporting student success. At the same time, the student population in most classrooms is rapidly changing. Post-traditional students—frequently defined as students balancing other life demands like work and caregiving—are the new majority. These students require a new level of flexibility to access the benefits of attaining a degree or credential.
Barriers and Challenges for the Modern Learner
For post-traditional adult students, time poverty is the biggest challenge they face. Time poverty refers to the competing needs and priorities of a student already doing all the things most of us do in our everyday lives—working full-time, caring for family members, engaging in our communities—who then makes the enormously brave decision to return to school to earn a degree or credential. Some of them may look more like what we think a traditional college student looks like, and some may look very different. But they are the new majority in most college classrooms in our country, and they need institutions to provide the support and flexibility that help them succeed.
The next challenge is confidence in themselves and the institution they want to attend; confidence that, in working together, they will create a viable pathway to their educational goals. Many of our students have both a successful career and prior educational experience that might not reflect what they are capable of at this stage in their lives. Choosing to pursue a degree or credential means putting yourself back in the learner’s seat, where you will be uncomfortably reminded that there are a lot of things you have yet to learn.
We frequently see students who have very high expectations for themselves and their academic performance, which is great but can also mean that they really struggle when they cannot meet that standard. It can be easy to mistake the signals that you are learning and always have more to learn for the signals that you are failing. And when you have reached levels of mastery in other areas of your life, you feel that performance gap much more clearly. Students need support systems both inside institutions and in their own lives that help them sustain and refocus when they struggle. They need people who are willing to be transparent about their own journeys and the help it took them to succeed.
They also need to have confidence that the institution they are choosing is making the choices needed to create viable pathways for post-traditional students. Although research continues to show that each degree earned makes a substantial difference in things that are important to us all—income potential, standard of living, health and happiness, not just for the learner but often for generations to come—there is a lot of fear that the investment of time and money will not pay off. Additionally, post-traditional students are concerned that institutions won’t be prepared to best serve students like them, that they will not be welcoming places, and not provide the flexibility or the support services they need. Institutions must do a better job of helping to instill this confidence. We need evidence that our students see the benefits of their degrees in all aspects of their lives, and that we understand their needs and are prepared to support success for all students.
Student Expectations in a Changing Landscape
The most fundamental expectation students have is that their institution is responsive and adaptable. One element of that responsiveness is that the institution listens to them about what their needs are and comes to the table with options to meet those needs. They expect us to be the experts on how learning happens across broadly diverse groups of people for each and every content area. They want us to actively engage in understanding who they are, what they bring to the table and where their learning gaps are, in addition to understanding what they need to know when they complete a specific degree in order to gain its advantages.
Increasingly, students do not see instruction and support as separate functions. They really see them as systems that should be fully integrated, as they understand the student experience holistically, from the parking lot or login page to the graduation stage. This is how most institutions were designed. Most institutions have historically had very clear lines between student support, student life and academics. Particularly, as we see more students experiencing time poverty, they need institutions to have streamlined, transparent processes and for all their pieces to be working together internally to support student success in ways we haven’t had to in the past.
Implementing Effective Frameworks for Student Success
One of the most critical things institutions can do is increase opportunities to learn about students from students. Increasing awareness of the changing needs and challenges of post-traditional students on our own campuses is critical. For many folks, though by no means all, on campuses, the educational journey was more traditional. And their expectations of what an institution should do to support students were very different. Ensuring we are listening and responsive to who students are today and what they need to be successful takes time and effort. Institutions need to find ways to fund, reward and incentivize those investments at all levels.
Another really helpful thing we have done is adopt a universal design-inspired model across all aspects of the student experience, taking the position that all operations a student interacts with are learning points and should be accessible, inclusive, equitable and challenging. When we look at education beyond a traditional learning environment, it drives us toward purposeful, reflective and responsive process design that insists on access and transparency. Among my staff, for example, we have adopted a model of thinking about all our processes from the viewpoint of someone who has never interacted with a higher education institution before and needs to have accessible, supportive resources to reach their goals. For online students, that often means streamlining processes, creating multimodal process support tools they can use on their own timeline, and ensuring everyone who interacts with students on our team is empowered to stay engaged with students as long as they need to.
The last model is adopting a commitment to transparency whenever possible. My teams often support students in completing processes off campus. Clearly laying out both the steps and timelines for processes allows students to know what we expect of them and what they should expect of us. This commitment means being transparent even when it doesn’t make us look great. If it will take two weeks for an office to process a particular request, being transparent about it from the beginning helps students plan, but it also alleviates a lot of anxiety about whether they have made a mistake or their request has been lost.
Transparency can be a powerful untapped resource for student success in other ways too. In our offices we strive to be transparent, not just in our processes and expectations, but also in normalizing struggle. When we shed light on the commonality of our struggles, both past and present, we can empower others to see that struggle is part of the process, not a sign that you are doomed to personal and professional failure. This view might seem extreme, but in a recent survey we took of new online students at our institution, nearly 40% of respondents indicated they would think less of themselves if they needed to receive academic support.
While we need to maintain appropriate professional boundaries and confidentiality, acknowledging, for example, that it is normal for some things to be harder to learn than others can go a very long way in opening a student up to seek the support they need to succeed, particularly when it is paired with stories of eventual success. It can be as simple as acknowledging that you got support from a tutor in a challenging subject or having a colleague read through an email to make sure it sends the right message. This transparency allows students to see that utilizing support networks is how all of us succeed in the things we do every day. It helps students frame people they respect and admire as people who use their resources, ask questions, seek support and respect others who do the same.
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