STUDENT SUCCESS IN THE ONLINE ENVIRONMENT: A MATTER OF STRUCTURE

The virtual learning environment that exists in many online graduate courses may foster or hinder student success based on numerous factors. Faculty instructors may use information on their students’ learning-style preferences to create an academic learning environment that accommodates individual student needs. The online course setup offers educators an abundance of opportunities to provide students with engaging, stimulating, and challenging lessons and a variety of alternative assignment options (Cicco, 2014). This article will review the possibilities for enhancing the virtual learning environment for graduate counseling students enrolled in online courses. It will focus specifically on students’ unique needs and preferences with respect to the element of structure, as it is described in the Dunn and Dunn Learning-Style Model (Dunn & Griggs, 2003). Interpreting graduate students’ personal requirements for course structure will allow for matching the virtual classroom decorum with the respective amounts of necessary structure. In practice, utilizing this information translates into to consideration of how the course instructor designs and plans crucial pieces of a comprehensive set of online learning modules. Specific examples of how educators may appropriately employ learning-style profile information to help prepare a virtual learning environment that is most conducive to higher learning will be presented (Jung, Choi, Lim, & Leem, 2002; Rundle, 2006; Yang & Chou, 2008). This article will emphasize the levels of structure that may vary in activities such as creation of the course syllabus, provision of individual assignment instructions, development of discussion board directions, and the layout of weekly assignments in the form of a weekly roadmap. The online course instructor that successfully offers variation in structure will allow students to emerge from the course experience with greater sense of autonomy and satisfaction in the learning process (Cicco, 2009). The results of a positive online course experience, one that involves a comfortable and trusting virtual learning environment, inevitably help to encourage learner responsibility, improved academic performance, and successful course completion and retention (Meyers, 2008; Trepal, Haberstroh, Duffey, & Evans, 2007).