The Online Learner's Playbook

Cherlanda Lavan Hartsfield is an adult education specialist and instructional designer who has spent more than fifteen years helping working adults learn at their own pace. Her career began in community college advising, where she watched capable students start courses with enthusiasm and then quietly disappear under the weight of jobs, families, and unfriendly schedules. That experience shaped her lifelong mission: to make learning fit the lives adults actually live.

She holds a Master of Education degree with a focus on adult learning and has designed curriculum and coaching programs for workforce development organizations, online training companies, and university continuing education divisions in the United States. Across her career, she has worked with adult learners making major transitions — new careers in technology, health care certification programs, first-generation degree students, and professionals returning to school after years away.

Her own story mirrors the one she writes about. While working full time and raising children, she earned an advanced degree through a self-paced online program, and the systems she built to survive that season — brutal honesty about her energy, micro-session scheduling, and a deeply held conviction that a missed week was not a failure — became the foundation of this book.

She is a frequent speaker on adult learning, study habits, and career reinvention, and her writing has appeared in industry publications on workforce education. She believes that no one is too busy to learn, only too unsupported — and that with the right structure, any adult can finish what they start, cheerfully and on their own schedule. She lives in the southeastern United States, where she still takes an online course every year, just to prove her own method works.