The Postsecondary Teaching with Technology Collaborative is a research and capacity-building center that aims to study and improve how faculty lead and manage online courses to support student success. Specifically, the Center is investigating how faculty can adapt their teaching and use technology features to help students apply and strengthen a set of mindsets and strategies—such as their sense of belonging and self-efficacy, as well as help-seeking and self-evaluation—broadly known as self-directed learning skills.
SRI Education and the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Columbia University’s Teachers College lead the Collaborative, in partnership with Achieving the Dream, a national leader in championing evidence-based institutional improvement, and nine broad-access colleges and universities.
Faculty need evidence-based guidance to successfully adapt how they teach in online course environments. Research suggests that faculty can leverage widely used technologies, such as learning management systems and adaptive homework systems, to support students in applying and strengthening self-directed learning skills. The Collaborative is building on these findings to provide much-needed insights for faculty, administrators, and education technology developers about what combination of instructional strategies and technology features faculty can use to best help students achieve their full potential in a rapidly expanding online learning landscape.
To meet this need, the Collaborative aims to:
- Increase awareness of the importance of self-directed learning skills in postsecondary contexts
- Develop an instructional model with comprehensive guidance to support faculty to embed self-directed skill development into teaching with technology
- Support colleges and universities in building capacity to improve instructional quality in ways that support the diverse students broad-access institutions serve, and ultimately, to improve student outcomes while achieving educational equity
- Strengthen feedback loops among researchers, practitioners, and education technology developers to generate better ed-tech products