The learning specialist assists Eastmond with negotiating contracts, putting together operations, and incorporating learning resource tasks and procedures into the WGU enterprise system. The learning resources coordinator deals with overseeing operations, getting resources into the WGU catalog, and ensuring that students can click on the appropriate online resources that are aligned to their Academic Action Plans. The learning resources clerk assists the learning specialist and the learning resources coordinator and is also responsible for textbook adoptions and for the management of student tutoring services that are provided to those students in need of academic assistance (which are in addition to the mentoring and progress management counseling that students have regular access to).

Working Relationships

For instructor-led online learning courses, some of WGU partners include Chadron State College, Rio Salado College, Utah State University, California State University, and Northern Arizona University. Eastman explains that some of these online-learning-provider partnerships leave open slots for WGU students in their traditional online courses that are offered on a full-semester basis. Other arrangements have open enrollments in 8- to 12-week online courses that are offered on a consistently revolving basis throughout the year.

"We also work with some nimble entrepreneurial enterprises that offer online courses on a monthly or twice-monthly basis," says Eastman, referring to such companies as Wasatch E-learning. Plus, some information-technology or business-oriented, independent-study e-learning modules that can take anywhere from four to eight hours to complete are provided by such companies as NetG and SkillSoft. Eastman also mentioned that MyLabSchool, which has a collection of online tools designed to help students transition to teachers, and TeachScape, a technology-enabled professional development services company for educators, are utilized in the Teachers College.

The Independent Learner

Ironically, the most successful students at WGU, according to Janet Schnitz, executive director of Teachers College, are those who work well with accessing and utilizing the many independent (also referred to as "individualized") learning resources that WGU provides, not the students who rely on taking the instructor-led online courses offered by institutional partners.

In addition to self-paced e-learning modules, independent learning resources, for example, can include everything from links to important websites that are closely aligned to competencies, textbooks, online simulations, active participation in cohort discussion forums, journal articles and other research resources that are found through the online library services, and much more.

"We find that the students who rely (mostly) on online courses are usually the weaker students, and they also need more guidance and support," says Schnitz. "The students who work with our independent learning resources and our mentors seem to do much better in the programs we have to offer." Schnitz adds that many students come into WGU "being field dependent," and, over time, become "field independent" and more able to build their own educational pathway.

Eastmond explains that WGU is starting to move towards providing more "self-directed, smaller learning resources that we can bundle together and have our students study. What we have found is that when we provide just instructor-led online courses from other institutions, the students wait for the professor to tell them what they need to know, what they need to do, and what resources they need. These students are not as self-directed."

Self-directed Over Other-directed

"When our institutional research department studied our graduates, they found that those who had graduated, or those who were making good academic progress, had used or taken advantage of our independent learning resources," Eastmond continues. "Some of the students who were not making progress, or were dropping out, were relying more on instructor-led courses." In other words, they were more other-directed than self-directed. Such studies have pointed WGU in a direction whereby the institution, overall, is "very intentionally trying to move students in a way that empowers them to be more self-directed learners."