Thinking About Your Thinking: Metacognition and the Adolescentizing of Online Higher Education

Online education is considered a modern landmark in Self-Directed Learning (SDL), but current trends place that characterization and the effectiveness of the delivery method in jeopardy. U.S. growth trends indicate increasing numbers and percentages of younger students entering virtual classrooms, compounded by wholesale shifts to online delivery in the wake of COVID-19. As the online arena transitions from working adults seeking educational access to entire undergraduate populations, online education appears to be evolving from an alternative delivery method into a ubiquitous form of higher education, thereby losing its identity as SDL and with all the pedagogical consequences such an evolution implies. Amid calls for increased student access and the continuing clamor for accountability, we examine differences in metacognitive awareness and regulation strategies in the multigenerational melting pot that has become undergraduate online education. While our findings indicate that younger students possess lower metacognitive capacity for maximizing online success and lead us to caution against wholesale implementation and its overuse for younger participants, we also offer considerations to help both faculty and institutions leverage the benefits of effective online delivery and encourage them to move beyond the stale methodologies that all too often separate motivated students from truly meaningful education.