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Articles by Christopher Hill

03:05:2010

Does Teaching Online Really Take More Time?

There are certain widely held ideas about how time is used in distance education. One is that distance education “takes more time” than face-to-face teaching. This is one of those axioms that people accept and repeat, but don’t think about. Because as soon as you start to think about it, questions arise: Exactly what takes more time? Course development, or teaching? How much more time does it take? Does it take less time to teach the second time you teach it? What about the third? What takes longer to master—the technology, or online pedagogy?

Lee Freeman, who administers the online MBA program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, decided it was time to answer those questions and maybe challenge a few misapprehensions about time in online teaching. He surveyed instructors in all different schools and colleges of his institution. He came up with some useful facts and busted some myths.

The big findings
What Freeman calls his “big finding” is that, relative to face-to-face development, online course development really isn’t as terribly time-consuming as people say. The extra time spent developing an online course as opposed to a face-to-face course is proportionately similar to the extra time spent teaching the online course compared to classroom teaching.

And guess what? “Teaching [online courses] isn’t all that bad either,” as Freeman says. “Basically,” Freeman says, “after the second or third time the instructors are comfortable with it and that learning curve has been reached.”

This curve is reached relatively soon for online pedagogy and even faster for the technology itself. “After the first or second time people were comfortable with the technology and beyond that they figured out how to teach it,” Freeman says. In Freeman’s research, it appears that it takes an instructor a little longer to figure out what they want to do with the course pedagogically than to become comfortable with the technology.

“That’s one of the biggest things, that the technological learning curve is shorter than the pedagogical learning curve,” Freeman says. “The technology’s not the problem. It’s not what’s making people take longer when they teach.”

Second (and third) time’s the charm
Freeman was able to demonstrate that, once past the first online course, there is a significant reduction of instructor time. This leads him to believe that much of the complaint of excessive time consumption probably comes from the first-time experience. One implication of this is that, if instructors can be conscientiously coached through their first online experience, they are likely to find things much better on successive tries.

Freeman’s data doesn’t challenge the assumption that it takes longer to develop an online course than a face-to-face course. What he has established is that the teaching, as well as the development, become less time consuming, and that that change can come as early as the second or third time out.

Four lessons for distance ed administrators:
What are the lessons for distance education administrators in Freeman’s investigation? The research suggests four ideas:

  1. Make sure faculty understand that they’re starting something new. You have to make sure faculty understand that, while they may be teaching the same content, there is going to be a bump that they have to climb over. It’s going to take some time and some effort but it will get better.
  2. Teach your faculty to think about their course in a different way, to be ready to do things differently. Let them know that teaching online gives them an opportunity that they may overlook in the classroom because they are habituated to the way they have always done things. In teaching online, the nature of the technology allows and sometimes requires teachers to change things. Whatever kind of change that may be, the directors and instructional designers, while not pushing any particular technique, should always be showing what’s available and reinforcing new ways of doing things.
  3. Use your instructional designers. As the faculty member is developing the course with the instructional designer, the designer should be on the lookout for time consuming approaches. If they see that the teacher setting up a time consuming situation for themselves, the instructional designer should alert them and where possible suggest ways to get the same results by doing things differently.
  4. The more an administrator knows about the process of course development, the better he/she can manage. Program managers and administrators should be sure that they understand what online instruction takes and that they communicate it well. If they do, they will face fewer instructors coming back saying they’re never going to teach online again. As Freeman says, “Let them know that what happened the first time is not going to be the constant truth of what’s going to happen every time.”

Excerpted from Time Requirements for Teaching Online: Beyond the Myths, Feb. 1, 2008, Distance Education Report.

01:08:2010

How One Online Program Won the Sloan-C Award

Ever wonder what an online education program needs to do to win a Sloan-C award? The associate of science degree program in veterinary technology at St. Petersburg College, Florida, won the Sloan-C Most Outstanding Online Teaching & Learning Program award in 2007. What follows is an excerpt from an interview Distance Education Report conducted with Dr. Richard Flora, dean of the School of Veterinary Technology.

Q: Was the online AS in veterinary technology an online program from the beginning, or did it develop out of a face-to-face program?

Flora: The online program grew out of the face-to-face program. The distance program was accredited by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) in 1995, but the conversion process started in 1991. We were kind of online pioneers. Our online program was the first online vet tech program fully accredited by the AVMA.

Q: Was it hard to enlist the participation and support of faculty?

Flora: At first there was a little bit of uncertainty. It wasn’t really “I’m not going to do this,” but they were just wondering how it was going to work. But the faculty here really has and does embrace the online environment. The same faculty that teaches on campus teaches online; the courses are exactly the same, just delivered differently. And so the faculty has really embraced this and really has developed it to the point where it is now.

Q: Were there struggles getting the program accepted by the market?

Flora: Back then online instruction was just something that wasn’t being done. So the reputation of an online college wasn’t that great. People looked at it pretty skeptically. When the accreditation process went through at the AVMA they really took a pretty hard look at it, and that helped the acceptance.

I think the biggest milestone in acceptance was the performance of the online students on the national licensing test. The online students consistently score a good standard deviation above the on-campus students. The first students would have taken the test in ’94/’95. That’s when you could start comparing performance on a standardized test. We’ve used the fact that our online students perform so well to market the course to prospective students. We still make sure students are aware of that right from the start.

Q: Do you regularly revise the curriculum?

Flora: Yes, we’re continually looking at the curriculum because veterinary medicine is changing so rapidly. Part of what we have to do is make sure we maintain the requirements to be accredited by the American Veterinary Medical Association. They put out the things that an accredited program has to cover. Our faculty’s really good about staying current, altering courses every semester for the new information that’s out there. It changes from semester to semester; nothing’s static at all.

Q: What were some of the aspects of the program cited by Sloan-C in presenting the award?

Flora: Student performance was a big one. And then they went in to look at the courses and look at the technology that was being used. That was the other big thing that they liked about it. We do a lot of audio chats instead of texting. And with reusable learning objects, our instructors have gone in and created video presentations especially for the lab classes. They might be talking about analyzing blood samples where they can narrate over slides of what they’re instructing about, and they are able to highlight different areas of the slides.

Or they can do video over their PowerPoint so that as they instruct on an abnormality in one of the white blood cell lines, the students can come into the class, open up that video presentation, listen to the instructor talk about the cells, and at the same time they’re talking about it, the technology gives them the capability of taking a cell off the slide, enlarging it, and highlighting the different areas of the cell that they’re talking about as they instruct the students.

Q: How do you train your instructors to teach online?

Flora: The College has what’s called the Web and Instructional Technology Services [WITS] Department, and they’ve created some great instructor training modules that instructors can go through at their own pace online, where it talks about the online environment, the college in general, and then goes through the capabilities of our course management system, in particular.

We have a very stable faculty. We may bring one or two adjuncts a year, but other than that we’ve had the same faculty teaching for several years now. We’re very fortunate there. We have eight full-time professors in the AS program and we have twelve adjuncts.

The same training program is effective for adjuncts, but we also always pair them with experienced instructors so they always have that experienced instructor in the background to monitor what goes on in the course or to answer questions or help when needed. So it’s kind of a mentor relationship for the first couple of semesters.

10:22:2009

More Principles for Improving Online Transparency, Quality

In Tuesday’s post, we introduced Transparency by Design, an initiative from a consortium of adult-serving educational institutions with significant commitments to distance education. Today we conclude the organization’s list of eight basic principles for supporting transparency:

#4 Faculty competence: First, and most basic, the faculty that are going to be teaching online must have the content background. But beyond that they have to get the appropriate training to teach online. They have to understand online pedagogy and they have to understand the technology they’re using. You need to be able to certify that the faculty have the appropriate skills. Then you need to constantly update the faculty on those skills. Finally you need to have a faculty evaluation system and use that information to feed back into the courses.

#5 Institutional integrity: Again, starting with basics, the institution must be accredited. Regional accrediting agencies are your allies in ensuring institutional integrity. They will help you look at what you say you’re going to deliver and what you’re actually delivering and help you make sure they match. Institutions must be rigorous in establishing outcomes for programs and courses and measuring their effectiveness—are you achieving those outcomes?

“You say you’re going to do something and you show that you’re actually doing it,” says Merle Harris, president of Charter Oaks State College. Here, too, a key point is to make this information easily accessible to students. “You have to be upfront about it and make sure that people know that you are going to be upfront about it,” Harris says.

#6 Excellence in student services: The guiding principle is that you have to recreate online all the services that are offered on the ground. You have to be sure that students can get online advice and counseling. You have to make sure they can get complete information about their courses in advance. The online registration process has to be efficient. Students must have access to library services online. Online tutoring services should be available. You have to be able to accomplish financial aid transactions at a distance. Since the students are using technology they have to have a help desk. Not only must you recreate the services that students could walk to on campus—in most cases you actually have to do a better job because often enough students have a difficult time connecting with services on-campus.

#7 Integrity in marketing: Make sure you’re giving a clear and accurate message about what you actually can and do deliver, so that you’re not making promises that can’t be fulfilled. As with other aspects of transparency, integrity in marketing has to do with providing relevant information on your website—what the graduation rate is, what the alumni say about the program, etc.

#8 Curricular quality: “We have to make sure that there is quality in the content,” Harris says. For example at my institution courses are reviewed by other faculty members both before the course is offered, and the first time it’s offered, and then it comes up for review again within at the most five years—it could be earlier.” This periodical review is necessary to be sure that outcomes are clearly stated and that the students are achieving those outcomes.

“The keys are disclosure, transparency, the ability to interact with students easily and the quality of the curriculum. So that we know what we’re trying to achieve and we regularly measure it.”

Excerpted from Transparency is Good Practice for Online Administration, Distance Education Report, April 1, 2008.

10:20:2009

Principles for Improving Online Transparency, Quality

Transparency by Design, an initiative from a consortium of adult-serving educational institutions with significant commitments to distance education, is based on the premise that a well-informed student—or prospective student—benefits everyone. A key focus of the plan is providing program-specific outcomes data that allows students to make informed decisions about their education investment.

Michael Offerman, president of Capella University, who led the working group that shaped the initiative, said that “To meet the education needs of adult students, we must provide them with trustworthy and transparent ways to choose among many available options and to gauge the potential of each one to further their careers.” The goal of the program is “to lead universities and colleges toward greater accountability and transparency.”

Transparency by Design institutions began issuing annual reports that include comprehensive data for each course of study, including student demographics, completion rates, costs, student engagement, and knowledge and skills learned. Most important, Transparency by Design reports include outcomes at the program specialization level, allowing prospective students to assess how well a program will prepare them for their professional pursuits.

One of the requirements for implementing Transparency by Design is the development of a new set of best practices for participating institutions. “You want to make sure things are in place at the institutional level,” says Merle Harris, president of Charter Oaks State College, who has been instrumental in developing just such standards. “Collectively we went back and we looked at best practices that have been put out by other organizations for online learning and then we developed our set based on those,” she says.

Harris and her associates concluded that there were a few basic principles for institutions that really want to be transparent.

#1 Make distance education a central element of your mission: Distance learning really has to be central to what the institution is doing. If it is viewed as an add-on and not part of the central mission then very often it doesn’t get the resources that are needed to carry out a quality program.

#2 Accountability to stakeholders: Who are the primary stakeholders in a transparent institution? The prospective student and the enrolled student. “One of the reasons we feel it’s important to have accountability measures and to report on those regularly is because prospective students who are making a decision about where they want to go to school, where they want to take courses should have information,” Harris says.

Accountability to prospective students includes providing adequate information about the program, what it contains, and who’s teaching it. But it also includes measuring what happens to students who go through the program. Harris’ group looks at things like graduation rates, retention rates, what alumni say about the program, and measures of student engagement, with the aim of making this information readily available to prospective students.

#3 Responsiveness: In practice this means nothing more or less than good customer service, so that when there are issues and questions students can get quick answers. Responsiveness in the academic process means that faculty respond quickly to a student, so that a student who’s learning online can get an answer to a question or feedback on an assignment within 24 to 48 hours, depending on the institution’s policy. Administratively, responsiveness means that if there are questions about grades going out, about registration, about fees being paid the student will get very quick response either by email or by telephone.

Click here for Part II of this article.

Excerpted from Transparency is Good Practice for Online Administration, Distance Education Report, April 1, 2008.

08:14:2009

How to Train and Maintain Your Distant Faculty

When online instructors work off-campus, as many often do, it can pose unique challenges. The lack of contact with colleagues and the institution can lead to isolation, and drifting out of the main currents of technological and pedagogical innovation.

What’s more, distance faculty may not be aware of the degree of presence they need to have in a course, and may effectively just “sit them out,” rather than provide appropriate levels of input to the course. Isolated teachers can also find that they have missed opportunities for professional advancement, not being surrounded by colleagues and associates who can train them in the pedagogical application of new technologies. The missed professional development opportunities may eventually frustrate them, interfere with their career development, and cause them to leave the institution.

Technology also can create challenges. That’s why at Canada’s online Athabasca University, the faculty are shown that there is a pedagogical grounding for the use of the new technology, and it’s not just technology for technology’s sake. A survey of faculty there revealed that faculty weren’t very interested in new technology but if it increased their effectiveness as instructors they would make the effort to attend training sessions. The lesson seems to be that to keep faculty up to date you have to focus on the pedagogy, and why the technology supports more effective pedagogy.

According to the survey, faculty said some of the biggest obstacles to teaching online are:

To read this article in its entirety, download our free report: Best Practices for Training and Retaining Online Adjunct Faculty.

08:10:2009

Helping Your Online Faculty Succeed: Q&A with Kaye Shelton

While many online programs struggle with student retention issues, Dallas Baptist University has achieved an impressive 92% student course completion rate across its 34 fully online degree programs. Kaye Shelton, Dean of Online Education at Dallas Baptist University, shares some secrets for success.

Q: How can we turn teachers who were initially reluctant recruits to teaching online into regular consumers of the latest knowledge, research and best practices in the field?
Shelton: First of all, I believe that support specialists are critical factors in the success of online education. We are the distance education experts, not the faculty, and we have more time that we can devote to searching for resources. It is our job to provide as many tools and resources as possible to support excellence in teaching and help the teachers remain current as well as efficient. Actually, I believe that by providing the latest knowledge, research and best practices in the field and making them easily accessible often encourages those instructors who are reluctant because we are assuring them constant support and reminding them they are important to us and to the online classroom.

Some of my best success stories are regarding instructors who we bring in ‘kicking and screaming’ but leave our office with a positive outlook and with much less trepidation. As faculty support specialists, we should also try to make it fun during the professional development opportunities. For example, during our annual online faculty workshop, in a drawing, we give away prizes such as flash drives, iPods, and Flip video cameras which are items that can help them as online instructors. For those faculty who cannot attend, we mail them the resources and archives of the workshop.

Q: What are some motivating factors we can offer our best instructional designers and support specialists in addition to salary to make them stay with the program?
Shelton: One of the best incentives would be to provide professional development opportunities which help them remain more confident in their support of faculty teaching online. Offering opportunities to work from home and offering flexible work hours can be good incentives as well. I also try to remind my staff of how important they are to the overall process. Sometimes, those behind the scenes are less noticed, but in reality, instructional support staff can be critical to online success.

Q: What are the most important things we can do to help the faculty’s first online experience be a positive one?
Shelton: Teaching online is different from teaching in the classroom. Prior to the first online teaching experience, it is important to help the faculty understand those differences. We provide ePedagogy training for every first time instructor which offers tips and tricks for teaching online such as methods for saving time and keeping their email inbox down to a minimum. Instructors need to understand student expectations as well as institutional expectations, such as how often they are expected to be online with the students.

Q: Do you have to train your technical support people in the interpersonal aspects of support, the “human factor”?
Shelton: I am fortunate to have an incredible team of online course developers and don’t really need to spend time training on the “human factor.” They greatly respect our faculty and are patient with their learning process. We always tell the faculty, “There are no silly questions, so ask away!” I do sometimes need to encourage them though because it can be frustrating when our timetable doesn’t always match the faculty’s timetable and expectations. But being flexible, understanding and focused on the ultimate goal–which is excellent faculty support–is the most important thing we can do, because we are partnering with them to deliver quality online education.

08:06:2009

Online Course Design Should Consider Learner Characteristics

In the early days of online learning, text was the primary medium of instruction. Now options abound, but finding the appropriate tools and using them effectively is another matter.

“The problem is that many instructors try to emulate what goes on in the face-to-face classroom without carefully considering learner characteristics or learning conditions,” says Steven Terrell, professor in the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences at Nova Southeastern University. “Either they’re not aware of the multitude of new tools that are out there that can support different learning styles and course objectives, or they may be aware of them but don’t know how to use them or don’t have the time or money to be able to use them.”

Terrell recommends beginning with the learning objectives before deciding how to support the learners in reaching these objectives. These objectives may very well be identical to those in a comparable face-to-face course, but the way these objectives are addressed needs to suit the nature of the online environment and the learning preferences of a diverse group of students.

“Think of all the tools available first and as you’re developing the course objectives, and say to yourself, ‘Alright, if I’m going to have this objective, how can I present the material to the students so that it supports a given number of learning styles?” Terrell says.

Learner characteristics are influenced by several factors, including:

  • Locus of control: Is the individual student in control of the learning or are there external forces in charge of what the student learns?
  • Task orientation: Is the learner able to stay on task without going too far astray?
  • Level of motivation: Is the learner intrinsically motivated or extrinsically motivated?

Although he expected certain characteristics to have a dramatic effect on student success, Terrell found that there was no single preferred learning style that helped students to succeed in online courses. He speculates that high levels of motivation help dedicated students overcome some of their own shortcomings or those of the design of a course.

However, not all students have high motivation levels, and so the course needs to be designed to support all students and contribute to their developing intrinsic motivation. “The tools we choose should help a student become more task-oriented and more independent,” Terrell says.

Terrell provides several communication options for his students—email, telephone, chat, Skype and blogs.

“Wikis and blogs are very common these days. They’re really easy to set up and include in a class. They engage the students so they don’t feel divorced from the system. Some research shows that loneliness—the ‘it’s-me-against-the-world’ thing—drives away a lot of online students. Having communication tools readily available helps students,” Terrell says.

Terrell makes it a point to include a link to a digital library where students do further research. He also includes podcasts and learning objects that students can use and practice on as many times as they want.

Excerpted from Consider the Learn in Course Design, Online Classroom, January 2008.

07:14:2009

Distance Education Resistance: Understanding Its Origins

It’s a fact of life. Distance education proponents have to learn how to live with conflict. Distance education has been controversial from the start and in many ways continues to be so. Elizabeth Mitchell, PhD and Dr. Iris Geva-May, a professor on the Education faculty at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, have studied the resistance to distance education, where it comes from and how it can be mitigated.

Barriers to implementation
The literature that Mitchell reviewed is replete with studies and stories pointing out individual barriers to acceptance of distance education, and attempts to figure out what is the best way to deal with some of these barriers.

Up until now, the studies that have looked at barriers to distance education implementation have tended to view them from the technical or the administrative side. What Mitchell wanted to identify was more the “interest and values” sources of the problem. In looking at the literature from this perspective, there were four areas of difficulty that popped out:

  • intellectual reluctance
  • support
  • cost-benefit
  • change.

Intellectual reluctance is a lack of belief that online learning was a benefit to the teaching and learning process.

Support has to do with the perception that the institution values online learning enough to put in place assistance and resources to support faculty in their efforts. If that perception is not there, this is a major barrier to acceptance.

Cost-benefit refers to whether the faculty believes that distance education is worth the resources expended on it. Where do faculty place distance education in the priorities of institutional budgeting? “There are a lot of things that an institution could do,” Mitchell says. With faculty the cost-benefit factor is more a matter of values than money. Again that has to do with attitude and perception.

The study revealed two different levels of change — changes in individual faculty roles and institutional change. In Mitchell’s interviews with faculty, she found that they felt relatively secure in their tenure rights and other job security-related issues. They felt that they could use online learning on their own terms. But there was a higher level of insecurity associated with fears of institutional change. The faculty members felt less confident about how the institution would change, about how their environment might change with the advent of distance education. Mitchell and Geva-May found higher levels of conflict in direct relation to the degree that faculty felt they had no control over developments.

“We had many faculty who said, ‘No-one can force me to do this. I’m tenured.’ Nonetheless when these professors experience change beginning in their own departments they are concerned. They feel that the changes may not be beneficial for them and would ultimately add to their work load significantly.

Mitchell found that many times faculty felt that the decision-making process is not especially inclusive—they wanted to be more a part of the discussion. Mitchell points out that it may be simply that the faculty members had decided not to be included. Nonetheless, there was an impression on the part of faculty that change was being made, and they were not as much a part of it as they would like.

Practical applications for distance education administrators
How can Mitchell’s study help a distance education administrator? “The most important thing about working with change is to be aware that even though as an administrator you may feel you are being inclusive, it may not be perceived that way. And that you really look at how you are going to deal with that issue, so that faculty feel involved, not just informed.”

The key factor that Mitchell found that affected the level of conflict was the actual experience of online learning. There was a direct correlation between experience of online learning and acceptance of it. Mitchell explains that there are basically two schools of thought about faculty and distance education. “One is that you do get faculty involved, another is that if you do get them involved they’ll say that it’s too much time and effort, and they will fall by the wayside. What this research is saying is no, if you get them involved then your chances of actually implementing this are better.”

Excerpted from Is Conflict Inherent to Distance Education?, Aug. 1, 2007, Distance Education Report.

05:15:2009

Six Steps to Creating an Effective Online Orientation Program

“If you’ve never taken a web-based course you don’t know what you do in the online classroom, you don’t know how to use the tools in the online classroom; you don’t know how to do the equivalent of how to raise your hand.” So says Danielle Karpus, Distance Learning Support Specialist at Cuyahoga Community College.

Cuyahoga is Ohio’s oldest and largest multi-campus community college with about 10,000 online students, many of whom were entering these classes with no idea of what to expect.

To address this problem, Karpus and the distance learning team at Cuyahoga created an online orientation program for students.

1. Move from in-person to online orientation
Cuyahoga started by doing in-person orientation sessions in the classroom, but met with student complaints. “We had students saying ‘I signed up to take a web-based course, I don’t want to be coming to campus,’ Karpus says. “That’s when we started playing around with virtual orientation tools.”

2. Logistics
Karpus conducts the virtual orientation live, in her office with a webcam and headset. She records each session, so that it can be offered to students any time they log in. There is a link to register for in person sessions, but there is always a link to a recorded virtual session.

3. Convenient scheduling
Not only did the students want virtual orientations, they want them at times that were convenient for them. They don’t want them from 8:30 to 5 when they’re working, so Cuyahoga has taken to scheduling orientations in the evening and even on the weekend.

4. Hands-on training
Students are surveyed after every orientation. Part of the feedback Karpus and her team got from the students was that it was helpful to watch the instructor showing them how to use Blackboard, but they wanted to try it themselves. So the distance learning group created a sample site called “Blackboard for You” to give students some hands-on experience.

5. Keep students engaged
When Karpus runs a session she starts with a pre-formulated curriculum that’s about 40 minutes long. Then she opens it up to the students to allow some interactivity—she solicits feedback on any questions they may have, and what they didn’t understand.

“It’s important during a virtual orientation to have a way to see if they’re paying attention,” Karpus says. If she has a small group she can give them power to use the whiteboard. She’s also experimenting with a phone bridge, to allow students to call in during a session rather than just using text-based chat.

6. Show an impact on retention
Every public college and university is feeling the pressure to show increased student retention, student success and performance. Karpus is in the middle of a research project to determine if orientation makes a difference in a academic performance and online retention rates. She’s at the data-gathering stage, and she will be doing focus groups with students who go through orientation.

Excerpted from 10 Tips for Running an Effective Online LMS Orientation, Distance Education Report, May 15, 2008.

04:03:2009

Tips for Improving Online Retention

Retention remains a knotty problem for distance education. Bob Nash manages instructional design for Coast Learning Systems, a division of Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley, California. He proposes that online retention is a difficult problem because it is “multi-variant” – there is no single cause that can be addressed by a single solution. So instead of a single magic bullet for attrition, he proposes a multi-variant answer – a series of interventions that he has designed that, combined, have had measurable results in increasing student retention.

Here are just a few of his suggestions. To see the article in its entirety, download a copy of our FREE report, Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction.

1. An “early alert” system. If a distance learning student hasn’t been responding the first few weeks of the course the instructor can pass on the student’s name to this automated system. The student then gets an e-mail saying (in Nash’s words) “Hey we haven’t heard from you for a while – is there anything we can do to help you? Here are some services at the institution that might help you succeed.” The instructor follows up with a personal phone call or email.

2. An online tutoring program. Coastline instituted a program that included tutors available both on the phone and online, along with other student success services. “Those student who used it succeeded at higher rates than their peer group,” Nash says.

3. A student success course. “I would recommend a student orientation or a student success course,” says Nash. Coastline developed a three-unit student success course, called “Mastering the College Experience,” teaching learning skills, “life skills” and various aspects of college orientation. Enrollments are good and, in surveys, students have reported they feel more prepared to succeed after having taken it.

4. Learning communities. Nash calls this the tactic that has produced the best student retention rates. “The research recommends [learning communities] again and again,” says Nash. Coastline’s STAR Program is a group of cohorts that move through a program together. It’s an accelerated program so that students get their associate’s degree in eighteen months instead of two years. Classes are smaller and hybrid-style, split about evenly between face-to-face and online.

5. Focus on individual courses. Spotlight the ones that have the biggest problem with attrition. Focus on those while measuring results against the baseline. Pay attention to both the differences in course completion rates and the cost and resources it took to get there. Do a cost-benefit analysis, measuring return on investment.

6. Involve faculty. They are the key service providers. They should be involved in the needs assessment and in the planning because they’re going to have to implement it. You need their buy-in and advice, Nash advises.

Excerpted from 11 Tips for Improving Retention of Distance Learning Students, Distance Education Report, August 15, 2006.

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