Supporting the Mental Health Needs of California Community College Online Students

silhouette of a figure seated on a bench alone with his or her head leaning on a hand.
Photo by Jude Beck on Unsplash

The typical California community college online student is often managing quite a lot. Today’s environment is proving how difficult it is for students who are now expected to function almost exclusively online, to maintain a healthy work -school- family life balance. The recent May 20th, 2020 survey conducted by  The Student Senate for the California Community Colleges Senate (SSCCC)  revealed that since the Covid-19 pandemic began, and with the moving of their academic endeavors online, 67% of students surveyed reported higher levels of stress, depression and mental health related issues. Additionally, students also shared that many of them “are struggling with the move to an all-online environment, particularly those who depend on the services available to them through campus-based resources such as library, counseling, EOPS, college jobs, financial aid, grants, and health services.” SSCCC

Understanding our students’ ability and preparedness for practicing self- care is a key factor when it comes to encouraging them to seek out services appropriate to their needs. The demand for such services is even more apparent if the focus is on the online student population. By default, online students run the risk of being isolated from the support structures they once depended on as on-campus students. If we were to assume that online college students require access to the same support services that are provided on campus, plus a few additional ones unique to their learning context, then the need for colleges to provide increased access to those services online is a given. When a college invests in offering online mental health support, it is creating opportunities for practitioners to provide interactive solutions to engage students in a self-directed and anonymous way. One such investment would be to increase professional development and training opportunities for college mental health practitioners.

Self-paced Mental Health Online Courses from CVC-OEI/@ONE

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the issue; mental health practitioners were becoming more aware of their online students’ needs for their kind of support.  As a result, the California Virtual Campus-Online Education Initiative’s (CVC-OEI) Student Experience team was inspired to partner with experienced mental health practitioners from within the California Community College system to create the content for a dynamic self-paced course that introduces participants to multiple forms of distance mental health counseling. The course is designed for experienced mental health clinicians, and created to address the demand for more of this kind of professional development opportunities within our system. 

The self-paced Distance Mental Health for Clinicians Course offered by the CVC-OEI in partnership with @ONE; is a version of CVC-OEI’s popular 3-week Distance Mental Health for Clinicians Course. Through the course, participants learn how to identify challenges and potential solutions specific to distance mental health counseling. The course also educates participants on the legal and ethical guidelines for providing online mental health services. Any participant who completes the course will gain a greater understanding of the growing trends in online mental health services, and learn valuable strategies required when working with community college students online.

There are many benefits that come from having college mental health practitioners trained in providing online support. Expanding mental health services online contributes to greater equity by having the potential to reach a wider group of students, some of whom may never have sought out such services while on campus. By incorporating web-based technology in their professional repertoire, college mental health service providers have the opportunity to deliver non-intrusive treatment to a wider audience of students who may be dealing with health and wellness issues ranging from mild problems to those with more severe challenges. Equally important, having a trained professional who can relate to the “newness” of functioning in the online learning environment, which many students experience,  can create a bond and help generate successful results in treating students. Additionally, for some students, the anonymity that comes from receiving such services online can provide comfort and confidence for those concerned with the stigma and perception associated with being seen entering the Mental Health Office on campus. 

It is essential that we increase the number of opportunities for online mental health and wellness support and equally important, that students are made aware of their options when it comes to receiving such support. The Distance Mental Health for Clinicians Course is open and free to all.

Using NameCoach for Equitable Student Support Services

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According to Beckie Supiano in “How Colleges Can Cultivate Students’ Sense of Belonging”, a growing body of research has linked students’ sense of belonging on their campuses to a number of important outcomes, including their persistence in college and even their well-being. As a result, some colleges make an effort to help students- especially members of underrepresented groups- cultivate that sense.  The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Aligned with Chancellor Oakley’s Vision for Success to fully close CCC equity gaps, the CVC-OEI provides colleges with innovative tools, technology, and professional development in the areas of instruction and student services.  These ongoing efforts include applying an equity lens to address the disparate impact and surface institutional and systemic barriers in order to increase student success.

Darnell G. Cole, an associate professor and co-director of the Center for Education, Identity, and Social Justice at the USC, agrees that colleges should not take students’ sense of belonging for granted. Cole encourages colleges to have “a structure in place that’s designed to communicate that students matter. Just because students got into a college doesn’t mean they feel at home there.”  The Chronicle of Higher Education. Creating a sense of belonging and inclusion resulted in improved academic performance when the University of Texas improved outreach efforts by sending welcome and belonging messages to students from marginalized communities. In The Problem of Othering: Towards Inclusiveness and Belonging, john a. powell, offers belongingness as a way to move beyond tolerance and respect to ensuring that all people are welcome and feel that they belong in society. Prudence L. Carter, reflecting on Brown v. Board of Education, in Equity and Empathy: Toward Racial and Educational Achievement in the Obama Era, suggests our policies and practices must be student centered and reflect an institution’s intention, commitment to, and consistent efforts toward actively incorporating students from marginalized communities into every facet of the educational process...in classrooms, counseling sessions, categorical programs, and in the delivery of student services.

NameCoach

The CVC-OEI is supporting efforts in the California Community Colleges (CCC) to increase students’ sense of belonging in online instruction by providing innovative tools such as NameCoach, a new tool that nurtures inclusion in the classroom, available to all OEI consortiums colleges at no cost and available to all non-consortium CCCs at a discounted price. Founder and CEO of NameCoach, Praveen Shanbhag, developed the software to enable true inclusion in school communities through technology. NameCoach is a tool for students to record a pronunciation of their name and convey their gender, and easily share this with instructors, administration, staff, and student peers. The CVC-OEI will incorporate this software to foster belonging in other campus settings, such as the delivery of online student support services.

Why NameCoach?  Educators often struggle with correctly pronouncing the names of students from diverse populations. This software addresses the problem of name mispronunciation and misgendering.  According to Dereca Blackmon, Associate Dean and Director of the Diversity and First Generation Student Office, Stanford University, NameCoach makes it easy for students’ identities and cultures to be respected. “Belonging Uncertainty” is heightened for students of color and this sense of belonging is not equally distributed for students from traditionally marginalized communities. Mispronouncing students’ names and using the wrong pronouns can increase ‘belonging uncertainty,’ which Stanford research shows can affect students’ performance, stress levels and overall sense of being a valued part of community.” It is also a constant reminder to students that they do not belong. This also applies to misgendering.

Student feedback stresses the positive impact of using NameCoach. “This is great! This is why we push and remain critical. Instituting seemingly small things like this can have the largest impact on campus culture. It is a recognition of the value of diversity on campus.”  

NameCoach can be incorporated in online counseling, online mental health services, financial aid online support and online tutoring. Online Counselors will finally have an opportunity to properly pronounce their students names during counseling sessions, leading to increased student engagement and trust.  Traditionally used in instruction, NameCoach will expand into online student support services. Using NameCoach is an important step on the road to making student services more inclusive, welcoming and belonging.

Would you like to learn more about using NameCoach to create a sense of belonging within Student Services? Join us on February 1, 2019 at 12pm for a free webinar!

Opening Doors to Support all Online Students

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The Current State of Support for Our Fully Online Students

If you haven’t done so already, take the time to pretend you are a fully online student and try to navigate the many tasks that students need to do on a regular basis. What do you find? Are the services available to our online population equitable to those that are available on-ground at their college campus? What is the web presence like of your college's critical student services?  Which students are utilizing the services and which students are not and why? These are the many questions that we must ask when evaluating our distance education programs. On my campus, online course offerings are the first to fill but in turn, they have inferior success rates than our on-ground courses. Many times these students find themselves staring at a closed door looking for support that is limited.

What Online Support Should Look Like

Online support should be equitable to services offered in person.  As an example, on my campus, we have a financial aid lab for students to get help with their FAFSA or navigating their online financial aid portal.  Is this same support available to our online student population? If not, how can we provide this resource to our online student population? Maybe the solution involves leveraging the staff that currently work in the financial aid lab but have them utilize Cranium Café to offer the same services remotely. Additionally, we offer many workshops on all topics on campus but nothing online except for the orientation.  What if we recorded all of our workshops and made them available online? Or better yet provide a distance option for students to participate remotely with our students that are on-ground.

Online Support Supports All Students

Online Mental Health (MH) services provide anonymity, creating a safe environment to receive services. Once a student has participated in MH services online they may be more likely to reach out for additional support in person. In addition to MH services, other support services like tutoring, other health center services, special resource center or other services may have a stigma attached to them and preclude students from seeking help in person where they may feel comfort in reaching out online.

Inclusivity

This means providing the tools and support services for all of our students regardless of their background or how they are taking their courses. Online students must also be included in all of our equity conversations.

With all the buzz around Guided Pathways, how are we implementing the concepts of the 4 pillars for our online students?  Online students also need to be able to enter the path easily, have clarity in their path, have the support to stay on their path and to also ensure their learning on the path.

A New Paradigm for Student “Readiness”

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For years, @ONE has advocated that effective online courses should include a student readiness assessment. I begrudgingly included one in my online courses because it is a practice endorsed by leaders in the field, but felt like a hypocrite each semester as I assigned the readiness quiz to my students. In my heart, I felt readiness assessments were antithetical to my teaching values. Let me explain.

The assessment I used was similar to the Online Readiness Questionnaires used by UNC Chapel Hill and Penn State, or the Online Readiness Self-Assessment used by Stanislaus State. There are multiple iterations of these readiness tests online. The ability to easily share resources (which can be such an asset to online educators) meant that a single model of readiness assessment proliferated across institutions, resulting in very little variety in the content of readiness tests. These cookie-cutter assessments, often developed by highly competitive 4-year universities, ask the question, “Are you ready for online learning?”

While this may seem like a reasonable question, the assessments are designed to separate students into two buckets, the ready and the unready. The students deemed ready are encouraged to take online courses, and those deemed unready are discouraged from participating in online learning. Ostensibly, this type of readiness assessment helps students make informed decisions about the learning modality that is best for them, gently guiding them to the best fit. The reality, though, is problematic. These types of self-assessment may not be reliable or valid indicators of students’ actual abilities, as our answers may be biased toward the response that seems most desirable. In addition, for students who are taking the assessment seriously, the approach is culturally tone-deaf.

The cultural problem with this approach is two-fold. First, the community college students who are dissuaded from taking online courses after taking a readiness assessment developed by 4-year universities are precisely the community college students who may be most in need of the flexibility offered by online learning, such as working students and students with families. Second, the students deemed “unready” have the most to gain from taking a well-designed, supportive online course (more on this later).

Examining Assumptions

I encourage you to take one of the readiness assessments linked above. What you’ll find is a series of questions that gauge a student’s:

Behind these categories, however, are several assumptions that need to be examined.

Assumption #1: Successful Online Learners Must Be Self-Directed and Self-Motivated

A host of questions in traditional readiness assessments focus on ideal traits for online learners that support a myth that online learners are doing their work in isolation. For instance, questions like “I’m good at setting goals and deadlines for myself” seem to suggest that online courses don’t include clear learning goals or tools for alerting students about upcoming deadlines. The onus for staying on track is placed clearly on the shoulders of the student.

This myth is amplified in online education by the embrace of andragogic learning principles--the belief that college students are (or at least should be) self-directed adult learners, and if they are not, they are somehow deficient. The reality is, however, that many college students are on the way to being self-directed, but they may need support from teachers and peers along the way.

Assumption #2: Learning Online Is Fundamentally Different from Learning in Person

I want to place the emphasis here on learning. Traditional readiness tests ask questions such as “My learning style usually requires a structured lecture at its core,” or “I have to read something to learn it best.” Questions like these suggest online courses use a single modality--usually text. The reality, however, is that advancements in course management systems have made it easy to archive course material in multiple modes, from text, to audio, to video (including synchronous, live video conferencing). All courses across the spectrum--in-person, hybrid, and fully online--can now use systems like Canvas to streamline student access to course materials presented in a variety of modalities, with benefits to teaching a web-enhanced or flipped class being universally reported for many years. Let’s bust this myth for good, because online courses don’t narrow the options for teaching and learning--they increase them.

The assumption that online learning is fundamentally different also distorts a major characteristic of all learning in higher education--the fact that the majority of the studying and learning students do in all college courses is outside the classroom. Readiness tests often ask, for instance, if students are willing to spend 10-20 hours per week on a class, if they have a quiet place to study, or if they can work with distractions, suggesting that only online learners must study at home, while in-person classes don’t require study time outside of the classroom, distractions and all. We would never stand at the door of our in-person classes, asking students if they have the time and a distraction-free work place before allowing them entry to the class, so why are we doing this in our online classes?

Assumption #3: Online Learners Need Technology and Tech Savvy

This is, perhaps, the most problematic of the assumptions made by traditional readiness assessments. Questions that reinforce that students should own a new computer with high-speed internet access privilege wealthy students, and disproportionately discourage students who need financial aid. Some readiness assessments go so far as to suggest online students should not rely on campus computers or share a family computer. In addition, when readiness assessments ask if students have someone to help them with technology problems, they underscore the ways cultural capital, or lack thereof, affects the options available to lower-income students who may not have peers or family members to assist them with technology, an issue researchers such as Peter Sacks brought to the forefront of higher education over a decade ago.

When students of lower income are discouraged from taking online courses because of older technology, there is a problem. This problem is exacerbated, however, when students are asked to draw upon social connections to troubleshoot technology issues. Moreover, the focus on access to course materials via a computer with internet access overlooks an interesting trend in technology--a growing number of students access some, if not all, of their online course material via their mobile devices. The shift in technology use warrants a close look at our belief that desktop computers are the most effective tools for accessing online information.

Viable Alternatives

When I first started teaching online, the traditional readiness assessments felt wrong in my gut. Some of you may experience a similar feeling at the thought of allowing underprepared students to take an online class. Let me offer some evidence to reassure you that struggling in an online class is better than being dissuaded from taking the course.

In their comprehensive analysis of online learning outcomes in California Community Colleges, the Public Policy Institute of California (2014) noted that there is a persistent success gap when comparing completion rates in online courses to in-person courses. However, taking online courses “is strongly associated with improved long-term success rates” (Online Learning and Student Outcomes in California’s Community Colleges, p. 12). The PPIC report concludes that there is significant long-term value in taking online courses.

Guided Pathways

The 2017 Distance Education Report notes that we are “embarking on a comprehensive approach to redesign the community college student experience through the Guided Pathways framework. Guided Pathways helps put the PPIC report and student readiness for online learning into context by reinforcing the notion that all students, regardless of modality, should have access to courses that include integrated basic skills, on-boarding, advising, and instructional support.

Four Pillars of Guided Pathways: Clear Curricular Pathway, Help Students Choose & Enter Pathway, Help Students Stay on Pathway, Ensure Pathway Leads to Outcomes

The Four Pillars of Guided Pathways

A New Paradigm

The Guided Pathways framework, which focuses on long-term goals, recognizes that students are not in two buckets--the ready and the not-ready. Instead, all students deserve and receive individualized support along the way. In this paradigm, a readiness assessment is not designed to separate the wheat from the chaff, but rather can be used to help students, instructors, and counselors identify areas in which students may need additional support.

The Online Education Initiative’s “Quest for Success” breaks with traditional readiness assessments by offering students a deeper, more nuanced assessment of skills they may need for online learning, and then following up with a series of interactive learning modules that allow students to gain practical skills to support their long-term success. Rather than locking some students out of the benefits of online learning by separating them into a ready or not-ready buckets, the “Quest” program assumes all students are on a learning pathway, and meets the student where they are by supporting them in their online courses.

There is a caveat. The assessment portion of “Quest” is longer and more time-consuming than the 5-minute traditional readiness tests (and well worth the time), and there are a variety of follow-up modules from which to choose. Some campuses may choose to use the “Quest” program as an orientation to online learning. Others, however, may ask instructors to integrate the program into their online courses. Assigning students to complete the entire “Quest” program as part of your class may lead to information overload. To meaningfully support students, teachers and counselors should intentionally assign specific modules, and perhaps even tailor assignments to their course.

For instance, in my Communication courses, I ask students new to online learning to complete the first two modules, which focus on developing online learning skills, but allow students who have successfully completed an online course to choose from any of the other 9 modules. In our first week’s discussion, students share what they have learned from the modules, and develop learning communities to support one another. In a private reflection to me, each student is asked to identify an online learning skill they have mastered, and one in which they feel they may need support. I, in turn, use their reflections to tailor my support.

Are You Ready?

Traditional readiness assessments reinforce unrealistic and harmful assumptions about online learning, but the tools to push against these assumptions are in our hands. The “Quest for Success” program is an open educational resource free to all California Community Colleges. In addition, the CVC-OEI’s @ONE offers professional development courses to help faculty and instructional designers develop mobile-friendly, media-rich, accessible courses that include robust teacher-to-student and student-to-student interaction. We need to stop asking if students are ready for online learning--the continued growth of online courses clearly indicates they are. Instead, we should shift our focus to our courses and support services, asking, instead, if we’re ready for online teaching.

Want to get a closer look at the Quest Tutorials? Check out Introduction to Online Learning