Online Counselling for Advancing Self-Directed Learning in Higher Education

Introduction

One of the goals of counselling in schools is to help the learners to acquire self-knowledge and understanding, which should help them to develop self-directedness in every facet of their lives. Vuijk, Nijs, Deen, Vitale, Simons-Sprong, and Hengeveld (2018) described self-directedness as one’s “ability to regulate and/or adapt one’s behavior to the demands of a situation in order to achieve personally chosen goals and values.” It can therefore be surmised in line with Garcia, Cloninger, Lester, and Cloninger (2017) that self-directedness is a person’s system of self-government, helps individuals to recognize that their attitudes, behaviors, and problems reflect their own choices.

Self-directedness is particularly important to the field of education for two reasons. First, learning consists of self-regulative components and lies within the responsibility and abilities of the learning person (Hammond & Niedermann, 2010). On the other hand, the knowledge skills, attitudes and interest developed in the course of learning are expected to be brought to bear when individual comes across situations or problems, which may be new, different or similar. Therefore, when applied directly to learning, self-directedness requires that the learner take responsibility for his/her learning and is commonly referred to as self-directed learning. This may require the learner determining what s/he wants to learn, set the goals and objectives to achieve and the process through which the goals and objectives can be achieved, as well as, how the results would be evaluated.

This is particularly important in higher education where the acquisition of skills become germane as the stage serves as the gate for entry into the world of work. In fact, Juste and Lopez (2010) identified strategies commonly adopted by learners in higher education to improve their academic performance. These include concentration techniques, data collection techniques, selection and structuring of information techniques, discrimination and understanding of concepts techniques, retention and memorization (storage) of information techniques and application techniques. A careful scrutiny will show that these techniques can best be adopted in a self-directed learning milieu.

According to Loeng (2020) self-directed learning as a learning process can take place inside and/or outside the formal school setting. Kapur (2019) stressed the significance of self-directed learning to include the ease of transfer of learning and its particular usefulness to learn at a distance. In addition, it is believed that when individuals demonstrate their skills in a given technology or vocation, they are expressing part of their “self” in terms of the knowledge skills, attitudes and interest they developed in the course of learning. It is therefore an utmost necessity to find ways of helping individual to develop and express meaningful and pleasant self-knowledge and understanding.

Knowles (1975) identified eight elements involved in definition of self-directed learning, that (a) it is a process (b) that is initiated by the individual, (c) which may or may not involve the help of others, (d) the need to identify their learning needs, (e) develop learning goals from these needs, (f) find the necessary resources to attain these goals, (g) select and implement the proper learning strategies to meet their goals, and (h) determine how to measure learning outcomes. It therefore follows that learners may confront some challenges in the course of any of the stages in the process of self-directed learning. For instance, if one is new to a subject, it can be challenging to decide on what should be learnt first. The problem of self-motivation and interest, trying to find the easy way out, procrastination and time management generally can significantly affect the effectiveness of self-directed learning. In addition, designers of self-directed learning materials must have a good understanding of the learning styles, preferences and challenges that learners may confront, and integrate these understanding into the design of the materials to be used for this purpose.