**7. Fostering students' learning experience through professional development**

Our role as professional developers is to help instructors design courses that are autonomy supportive and student-centered, and that will enhance students' learning experiences. We help instructors create these learning environments that will meet students' basic psychological needs and foster self-determined, autonomous motivation, in order to foster growth, development, and well-being. We are not simply teaching the mind of the students; we are teaching the whole student and need to focus on students' growth and well-being in addition to academic goals and pursuits.

It is important to note that there is still a lack of research using SDT motivation principles to understand learning environments in higher education. The work emanating from our research lab and coming from our work with IMPACT is contributing to this body of knowledge and builds on the large amount of research conducted during the pre-college years. In conducting this research and growing the IMPACT program over the years, we have found that it is possible to come along side and teach college instructors how to become more autonomy supportive and create these autonomy-supportive learning environments for their students.

These learning environments created by instructors and perceived as autonomy supportive by college students across many disciplines, including STEM, are associated with greater satisfaction of basic psychological needs, self-determined

motivation, well-being, and in turn higher levels of achievement as measured by course grades (GPA) and higher levels of perceived learning as assessed by the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) [33]. In fact, the creation of an autonomy supportive environment regardless of the transformation implemented, is the most important and consistent predictor of the motivational and educational outcomes studied, including basic psychological needs, student motivation and engagement, perceived learning attainment and learning transfer, as well as actual performance as measured by grades [12, 29, 34–39].

In recent years, especially during the Covid pandemic, the importance and prevalence of online learning has risen. In addition to the necessities of online learning created by the pandemic, online learning provides access to higher education to students who otherwise would not be able to benefit from education. Our research work in this area suggests that the teaching and learning motivational model based in SDT is applicable to the online learning environments with similar results then those found across in-person environments [8, 9, 36, 40, 41].
