This blog post covers a comprehensive case study conducted with Western Governors University (WGU), exploring the development and impact of the Personal Learning Guide (PLG) on student success. This study highlights how WGU's innovative approach, supported by SmarterServices, has enhanced personalized academic planning and student engagement through detailed insights and tailored support systems.
For nearly 30 years, Western Governors University (WGU) has been focused on meeting students where they are in both their life and educational journey. The university was originally started by 19 western governors looking for a way to expand access to higher education for adults whose traditional college education was not compatible with their current walk of life. Leveraging technology, they created a fully online, competency-based university where adults could gain access to the education they deserved.
With over 150,000 online students, WGU serves a median age of 35-year-old learners with some college experience. However, their fastest expanding segment is learners for whom WGU is their first college with no prior transfer credits. Because of their affordability and competency-based model, WGU allows students to move at the speed of their own learning.
With their mission to meet students where they are, better understanding their students was a vital part to creating student success. However, WGU had an even greater goal to understand their students both at the front line faculty level, as well as giving their students insights about themselves to develop better understanding, insight, and autonomy. This included the need to build up their faculty’s capabilities to provide more personalized academic planning and determine insights needed to boost student success.
Originally, WGU used SmarterServices’ SmarterMeasure Learning Readiness Indicator for their nursing program to help determine their students’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Despite having great insights, WGU found that some students didn’t always complete the assessment due to the fear of not being admitted into the program.
“We wanted something that would give us and the students insights about where they stand and what kind of support that they need, but in a way that didn’t feel like their admission was on the line,” explained Dr. Jennie Sanders, Vice President of Instruction at Western Governors University.
SmarterServices then worked with WGU to create a customized white label version of the Learning Readiness Indicator called the “Personal Learning Guide” (PLG) that all of their students could utilize after completing orientation.
After taking the PLG, students receive an overview of the various support systems that are available and a glimpse into their own non-cognitive and cognitive skills, such as life factors, individual attributes, math and writing readiness, on-screen reading rate and recall, technical competency and usage, typing speed and accuracy.
“From that point, as students are beginning to onboard into their program, they will meet with their program mentor, and their mentor will review the tool results and some of the responses,” explained Destiny McNair, Senior Manager for the Faculty Experience and Academic Services team at WGU.
Then, program mentors will meet with their students to discuss the findings from the Personal Learning Guide. During the meetings, they develop a personalized support plan to help set each of the learners up for success. Due to the personalized nature of each learner’s support plan, a myriad of options and resources are available to help boost targeted areas of their skills to foster greater success.
Before the launching of the PLG, there wasn’t a systematic way to capture insights about their learners’ needs. But once implemented, WGU was able to better understand how to help their learners be successful early on in their educational journey.
“From an institutional level, we know more than we’ve ever known about our students and are able to serve them better as a result,” stated Sanders. “The PLG is now something that we have incorporated into virtually every predictive model that we have at the university. It’s just a really powerful tool and source of insight.”
“I supported students as a faculty member when we launched the Personal Learning Guide, and up until that point, we had zero visibility on how to personalize that first interaction,” McNair explained. “Now, post Personal Learning Guide, we’re already bridging so many gaps. We have more insight than we ever have from our students based on this tool up through their first day of beginning their program than we had prior. The PLG is a valuable tool to help faculty better personalize support to students while encouraging self-reflection through the resources surfaced in the student report.”
As for the success WGU has seen with their students, Sanders explained that “just taking the PLG is associated with a certain amount of increased probability of success — and that’s retention and progress. The different scores and different sections of the PLG are also rather predictive of how learners are going to do in certain courses, and that then helps us to understand who’s going to need a little more support in these particular types of courses.”
Sanders concluded that while chatting with a student employee at WGU about how his orientation was going, the student mentioned how much understanding the Personal Learning Guide gave him into where he was at in his current educational journey.
“Having been out of school for 10 years, it was really helpful for him to see the areas where he needed to improve before he went into certain courses.”
“He said, for him, that one of the most valuable parts of his whole onboarding process was going through reflection and really understanding a bit more about what it’s going to take and where he’s at… He felt that it was super empowering,” Sanders summarized.
Sanders ended by saying, “That’s exactly what we’re hoping to achieve. Education, so much of it is about reflection. Reflection is how we really learn in a deeper way — and the PLG really facilitates that earlier on for our learners in a way that sets them up for greater success.”
With their partnership, SmarterServices and WGU are able to create even more opportunities for meeting students where they are through their Personal Learning Guide.
WGU is a nonprofit, online university with the mission to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity by creating pathways to education for all. A student-centric university, WGU offers affordable, flexible learning and personalized one-on-one support. To learn more, visit www.wgu.edu.
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