Coping Together: Collective Self-Regulation in a Web-Based Course

Editors’ Introduction This chapter examines the challenges facing the online learner, particularly the self-directed learner. The author suggests that the most successful online learners adopt the skills of “strategic learning”; this is characterised by having developed high levels of self-regulation and having the ability to consistently deploy these skills. She points to communal factors as being a key determinant in the development of self-regulating strategies through modelling of peers and the instructor and through heightened self-awareness of their own self-regulation. The chapter reports on the findings from a learning design that transformed her online class into a “community of survival”; the detailed findings compare and contrast individual and collective self-regulation strategies, and from this emerges a set of guiding principles that learning designers can use to bring a sharper focus on the promotion of self-regulated learning strategies.