The Military Student's Time Poverty Problem

Inside Higher Ed has a great piece this week on the University of Louisiana System's StudyNPlay partnership, which gives student-parents a supervised space to study while their kids play nearby. It's a success and cost-effort to help resolve the use of "time poverty" that so many student-parents contend with each semester. Time poverty is the gap between finding a study window and actually having one, and it's a problem that many of us in the professional & continuing education space are well aware of because it affects nearly every adult or non-traditional student we serve.

The article has me thinking about active duty military members trying to finish degrees online. Civilian student-parents studying full-time on campus typically have modest control over their calendars. Active duty students don't have that control. Unlike a student-parent whose time poverty is chronic but predictable, an online active duty service member's time can vanish entirely with short notice or no notice at all.

I'm imagining what universities that claim they're a better place for military-connected students could do to operationalize something similar to the StudyNPlay program for their online active duty students. What if private universities increased the number of asynchronous courses they run, built with flexibility and self-guided learning, not a collection of recorded lectures and live sessions welded to a fixed course schedule that assumes a student can log in every Tuesday night? What if they implemented a policy for "orders-based" extensions and withdrawals that are automatic and don't require reams of paperwork and appeals to prove hardship to an untrained back-office staffer who's never heard of a permissive TDY? What if they hired qualified and trained advisors who actually understand military life, and not rely on AI bots or a shared inbox staffed by whoever is monitoring the student help email account that week? Just imagine the positive impact that would have on the persistence and success of online active duty military students. 

Imagine.

None of this is complicated. It's easily implemented because well-established schools and colleges of professional & continuing education have been doing versions of it for years. These are the units within every university that already understand learners whose lives don't run on an agrarian calendar.