Attrition in DE Courses and Strategies to Increase Retention

Have you heard your colleagues make the following statement? “Students are dropping out of my online course and the numbers are higher than I experienced in my face-to-face course. Why is the attrition rate so high? What can I do to increase retention?” Have you wondered if attrition rates are really higher in distance education (DE) courses? Do you want to know more? Then, read on!

Why is attrition such a serious problem?

Attrition, or the loss of enrolled students, in DE courses in higher education results in lost opportunities for those who leave the course, reduces institutional revenues and can ultimately affect the reputation of the institution. High attrition rates are seen as an indicator of low quality offerings. Attrition rates must be identified by the institution and the quality of the courses reviewed.

“The attrition rate is seen as a measure of the quality of education offered by the institution (Price, Harte, Cole, 1992). Student attrition in higher education is a major problem that has both economic and educational implications (Thompson, 1999).” (Moody, 2004)

Carr, 2000 (in DiRamio and Wolverton, 2006) gives us some general statistics related to attrition:
“Although they vary from institution to institution and program to program, attrition rates are typically 10% points higher in online courses than in on-campus counterparts”.

What are some of the best practices that I as a faculty member can use to encourage student persistence in the online course?

Morris and Finnegan (2008) combined findings from four studies offered by institutions in the University System of Georgia and generated several best practices for teaching online.

Use analytical tools (such as tracking logs) to analyze what students are doing in your course.
Many learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle or Blackboard provide the instructor with tools to track the student’s frequency of login to the course, the amount of time spent on specific content pages and the usage of tools like discussion forums, quizzes and assignments. Morris and Finnegan’s (2008) findings suggest that instructors should use tracking logs to analyze what students are doing in the online course. In the short term, this allows instructors to provide feedback to individual students on their participation. Nagel, Blignaut, and Cronje (2009) concluded that when students access the course and make contributions, they are more likely to complete the course, thus reducing attrition.

“Only students who contributed to the class or interacted with the facilitator completed the course successfully. Our calculations confirm that students who are at risk of not completing a course contribute less and their contributions are of poorer quality, reflecting less interaction with fellow students and the facilitator. Because of low frequency logins these students miss out on crucial support needed for success.” (Davies & Graff, 2005 in Nagel, Blignaut, and Cronje, 2009).

Using tracking data, you can identify students who are not participating and encourage them to do so. Beyond the immediate benefits to current students, data that is aggregated over time can be used by the instructor to identify successful behaviors and then pass on those behaviors to future students.

Analyze your role in the course.
Berge, 1995 (in Morris and Finnegan, 2008) suggested that there are four roles that faculty take on when teaching an online course. These roles are identified as social, pedagogical, managerial and technological. Morris and Finnegan (2008) reported that experienced faculty were found to utilize a variety of roles which led to greater student engagement whereas novice online faculty frequently focused on the managerial role.

“Experienced instructors primarily enacted a pedagogical role, giving course related feedback, asking questions, and engaging students with the content. Students in courses with experienced faculty were more active in discussions and averaged a greater number of discussion postings online than students in the courses of novice instructors.” (Morris and Finnegan, 2008).

To encourage active participation and “…avoid read-only participation..”, Nagel, Blignaut, and Cronje (2009) endorsed Klemm’s (1998) suggestions for the facilitator:

• communicate login expectations
• provide formative feedback for discussions
• grade students individually on group projects
• consider allowing students to form their own groups for group projects and/or rotate group members
• structure group assignments so that students cannot work independently from one another
• consider the use of other technologies to convey information to students (example, cell phones).

Consider student preferences for social information sharing.
Heo (2009) surveyed three generational groups (Net Generation, Generation X, and Pre-Generation X) to determine what types of information they found useful to learn about their classmates in order to form social relationships with them at the beginning of an online course. The results revealed that students found that sharing of email address was most helpful, while academic major and occupational category (programmer, school teacher, etc) were also beneficial. Heo (2009) suggests that:

“While the impact of this self-directed, relationship-based social awareness information sharing in the online learning environment needs empirical proof, if students have positive experiences with the information sharing this could influence online education at least five positive ways.”

These positive ways are identified below:

• decreased student isolation (Holder, 2007; Rovai, 2007 in Heo, 2009)
• positive effects in classroom participation due to the development of a social network (Jung, Choi, Lim, & Leem, 2002 in Heo, 2009)
• increased contributions by shy learners
• increased student collaboration (Cai, 2005 in Heo, 2009)
• extended life long learning

What are some additional strategies to decrease attrition in the fully online course?

Create a quality online course

• Review the Quality Matters Rubric Standards.
• Consider working with an Instructional Designer to design your course.

Encourage interaction between the instructor and the learner (Moore, 1989 in DeTure, 2004)

• Communicate your expectations clearly to your students. For example, discuss items such as frequency of login to the course site, late assignment policy, group work, email civility.
• Inform students during registration and again at the beginning of the course what the challenging learning tasks will be so they are aware of them (Tyler-Smith, 2006).
• Provide feedback while the student is working on major projects. Consider benchmarking assignments that have several pieces so students receive feedback during the production process allowing for improvement while they are creating the product.
• Contact and support learners who seem to be struggling: encourage, follow-up by email, instant messenger, host Virtual Office hours (Elluminate Live).
• Use traditional contact methods (phone) for those students who have never logged in and for those that are no longer participating.
• Provide feedback in a timely manner: a 24 hour time line is suggested. Be a daily presence in discussion board and asynchronous activities (Lamer, M., 2009).
• Call your students by name in the online classroom. Use the student’s name in a discussion post when he/she makes a significant point (Lamar, 2009). At least once during the semester write directly to each student.

Encourage interaction between learner to learner (Moore, 1989 in DeTure, 2004)

• Encourage students to identify common interests through ice breaker activities. These ice breaker activities can be modified and used in the discussion forum.
• Provide a sample post on the discussion forum to set the bar for the rest of the student posts as they work on the discussion forum assignment. Encourage students to respond to each other’s comments and ideas.
• Establish an area that is only for student use such as a cyber café (Alley and Jansdak, 2001 in Lamer, 2009).
• Establish learning communities in which learners work as part of a cohort.
• Set up a General Course Questions Discussion Forum and inform students that confidential posts regarding grades should not be posted here. Be sure to check this forum frequently to be sure that questions are being answered.

References
Break the Ice, Retrieved on 10/1/09 http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/breakice.htm

DiRamio, D., Wolverton, M. (C 2006). Integrating Learning Communities and Distance Education: Possibility or Pipedream?, Innovative Higher Education, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2006 (C 2006).

DeTure, M., 2004. Cognitive Style and Self-Efficacy Predicting Student Success in Online Distance Education, The American Journal of Distance Education, 18(1), 21-38, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Heo, M. (2009). Design Considerations for Today’s Online Learners: A Study of Personalized, Relationship-Based Social Awareness Information, International Journal on E-Learning (2009), 8 (3), 293-311

Lamer, M., (2009). Where’s Walter? Adjunct Outreach Strategies to Bridge the Virtual Distance and Increase Student Retention, Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, Vol, XII, No. II, Summer 2009, University of West Georgia, Distance Education Center, Retrieved on 8/11/09 from http://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/summer122/lamer122.html

Moody, Johnette (2004). DISTANCE EDUCATION: Why are the Attrition Rates so High?, Quarterly Review of Distance Education; Fall 2004, Vol. 5 Issue 3, p205-210

Morris, L., Finnegan, C. (2008). Best Practices in Predicting and Encouraging Student Persistence and Achievement Online, Journal of College Student Retention, Vol. 10(1), pp. 55-64, 2008-2009.

Nagel, L., Blignaut, A., Cronje, J. (2009). Read-only participants: a case for student communication in online classes, Interactive Learning Environments, Vol. 17, Issue 1, March 2009, pp. 37-51

Tyler-Smith, K. (2006). Early Attrition among First Time eLearners: A Review of Factors that Contribute to Drop-out, Withdrawal and Non-completion Rates of Adult Learners undertaking eLearning Programmes, Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, Retrieved on 10/1/09 http://jolt.merlot.org/Vol2_No2_TylerSmith.htm (Work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License)

Quality Matters Rubric Standards 2008-2010 edition with Assigned Point Values, Retrieved on 8/26/09 at http://qminstitute.org/home/Public%20Library/About%20QM/RubricStandards2008-2010.pdf