Self-directed Online Learning Accelerator

Welcome

Welcome to your bootcamp! For some of you this may be the first time you’re engaging in largely self-directed learning online, while others may feel they’re old pros. Whatever the case, learning in this way is undeniably different from learning face-to-face and from situations where your learning is directed by a more experienced facilitator or teacher. That tends to be easier for most people, in part because it is how they became accustomed to learning at school, but also because the learning journey is driven and structured for the student by an educator, who is often present and active in the learning experience.

In self-directed online learning, you are responsible for planning your learning, managing your time, prioritisation, scheduling and pacing how much material you intend to cover over a given period, motivating yourself, assessing your progress or degree of success, and making a plan to address problems you may encounter or catch up if you’re falling behind. Rather than information being pushed to you by a subject matter expert, you engage in actively pulling information, working through learning material and sometimes seeking out the information you need, and making sense of it.

At HyperionDev it is possible to access learning support from mentors (and sometimes lecturers, depending on the type of course you’re doing), but whereas at school you might have had a teacher note poor marks on a subject and recommend you take extra lessons or join an academic support program, in self-directed learning you will need to take the initiative to reach out and book a synchronous mentor support call. You will be expected to arrive in the online meeting room able to articulate your problem and demonstrate what you have done to solve it so far, and where and how you are running into difficulty.

So, if facilitated learning and self-directed learning are so different, how do you set yourself up for success in a self-directed online environment? In this resource, we’re going to introduce some powerful ideas that should help you orientate yourself and hit the ground running!