Retaining Online Students with a First-Year Experience Program

How do you acclimate students to campus life if they’re not actually on campus? It’s an important question. With the steady growth of online education, the number of distance learners is increasing. Unfortunately, their attrition rate is 10-20% higher than that of traditional students.

Given the success of First-Year Experience programs in retaining traditional students, it’s reasonable to assume they could have the same impact on distance learners. The question is: How do you create a meaningful online FYE program?

You’ll find the answer with Retaining Online Students with a First-Year Experience Program presented by David Ruth, PhD and Kristen Betts, EdD, principals in Drexel University’s 2011 NASPA Gold Award and Grand Bronze Medal-winning program.

During their 90-minute audio presentation, Drs. Ruth and Betts provide you with program best practices and insights to help you increase nontraditional student engagement. You’ll learn how to:

• Identify and catalog key services on your campus that can be easily replicated in an online FYE.
• Engage students early by integrating support services into a pre-orientation program, online FYE, and the curriculum.
• Acquaint students with academic, social and professional communities through enrollment in planned, optional activities.
• Use campus technology to reduce costs and redundancy in hosting events.
• Create a program that increases engagement and retention from enrollment through graduation, and into active alumni engagement.

You’ll also hear examples of innovative approaches being adopted on other campuses, ranging from online convocations to alumni webcasts to virtual wine and cheese events!

Order this Seminar

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive a PDF of the seminar transcript, all for the same price as attending the seminar live.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal web site for unlimited access by members of the campus community.

Who will benefit

• Department chairs
• Directors of online and blended programs
• Full-time, part-time and adjunct faculty
• Academic and student affairs deans
• Academic advisors
• Recruitment/retention specialists

The same kind of programming that works to retain traditional students can be used to retain distance learners. This seminar will teach you how to build your own online FYE program.

New for 2011! A Discussion Guide for Facilitators.
Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

Order this Seminar

Some of the more common learning disabilities include dyslexia, expressive language disorder, reading processing disability, and attention deficit disorder. Ideally, the students will self-identify and contact the institution’s disability services office so the instructor will know what accommodations are required, but not all students are forthcoming about letting others know about their learning disabilities, Crum says. For some, online learning provides the opportunity to hide their learning disabilities from classmates, which can be a welcome relief from the unwanted attention their learning disabilities received in their face-to-face courses.

This lack of disclosure makes supporting students with learning disabilities difficult for online instructors. Further complicating the issue is that under FERPA instructors cannot make the determination or question the student as to whether they have a learning disability. Instructors can raise concerns about a student’s performance (chronic late assignments, excessive errors in discussion board posts, irrelevant or inappropriate answer to questions that seem to indicate a lack of understanding, etc.) and recommend that the student talk with his or her advisor, at which point the student may make his or her learning disabilities known.

Supporting students with learning disabilities
In her research on the issue of addressing learning disabilities in online courses, Crum asked departments of disabilities how online instructors could help students with learning disabilities. Their response: open and constant communication, compassion, a willingness to bend the rules to accommodate students, and one-on-one instruction.

“You can pretty much see it as an online teacher within the first week of a course. You’ll see postings that just aren’t in synch. If you notice that everybody else is answering the question and one student is talking around the question, the next step is to contact the student immediately by phone or email and say, ‘What’s going on? Did you not understand the question? What can I do to help?’ Get to the bottom of it right away because if it is left unaddressed by week three, frustration sets in and the student basically adapts an attitude of , ‘Why even bother?’”

One aspect of communication that some instructors overlook is feedback on assignments. Crum comments on every paragraph of submitted assignments because it’s a great opportunity to maintain that communication with students. This is a technique she applies across the board, and it benefits students with and without learning disabilities.

Special accommodations for students with learning disabilities can include extending deadlines, working with the disabilities services office to help students get access to assistive software, or working individually with the student, and matching the struggling student with a professor that has a lot of compassion.

Crum has found that when students who need extra time initially receive it, they tend to get subsequent assignments in on time. Planning becomes a way for them to reach their potential once the obstacle of a due date is removed.

Students with learning disabilities may have difficulties with online courses that are predominantly text based. There are ways to get around it. There are several software products that read text aloud (such as ReadPlease, available at www.readplease.com/). In addition, textbooks could be loaded into Kindle, or other wireless reading devices, that can make reading easier by allowing students to increase font size and use with black letters on a white background.

Course design
Instructors do not always have the ability to alter course design to accommodate students with learning disabilities, but instructional designers should pay attention to course elements that might be problematic for some students. For example, students with certain visual discrimination disorders may have trouble distinguishing text from background colors.

“Some instructional designers have gotten fancy with colors, graphics, animations, and so forth, and it creates havoc for people with any type of visual disability. Designers need to take disabilities into account. The bells and whistles do not need to be in the electronic classroom. There are Web tools that are great at adding bells and whistles, but use them as an add-on instead of as one size fits all,” Crum says.

Crum also recommends that instructional designers test courses on students with learning disabilities. Doing so would enable designers to prevent problems before they happen.

Excerpted from How to Handle Learning Disabilities in the Online Classroom, August 2009, Online Classroom.

The following are some questions to ask yourself to determine whether your course has “the kind of communal infrastructure that makes learning fun and exciting.”

• Do you and your students know each other’s names?
• Are students comfortable engaging each other in discussion?
• Does the discussion occur inside and outside the instructional context?
• Are you and your students’ goals similar?
• Is there a sense that the classroom environment is a safe environment for learning?
• Do students display a shared sense of responsibility?
• Have you and your students made an emotional commitment to the course?

Reference

Baker, Jason D. and Woods, Robert. “Social Dynamics of Online Learning: Pedagogical Imperatives and Practical Applications.” 18th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning. Accessed January 17, 2008 from here.

Kristen Betts, assistant professor in the school of education at Drexel University; and Bernadine Sikorski, deputy human resources division leader for Bechtel Systems and Infrastructure, Inc., at Los Alamos National Laboratory, have set out to change this. In a recent paper, “Financial Bottom Line: Estimating the Cost of Faculty/Adjunct Turnover and Attrition for Online Programs,” the pair identify a variety of costs that can result from turnover and attrition of online faculty.

Divided into three categories – direct costs, opportunity costs, and indirect costs – the extensive list of potential line items will help online program administrators understand the potential financial impact of failing to retain qualified, enthusiastic faculty and staff for the program.

Direct Costs of Faculty Turnover
Direct costs, Betts and Sikorski write, are “fixed and variable costs related to hiring, salary/benefits, training, and support.” These are all costs essential for recruitment and retention of employees; the category also includes separation costs for employees that leave. Direct costs include the costs of recruitment, the application process, hiring, orientation and training, professional development and ongoing support, technology support and training, separation costs for the staff member, separation costs related to student attrition, and overtime. These subcategories encompass a wide range of potential costs, such as personnel costs to conduct reference checks, pre-employment drug testing, decreased productivity for the new employee until he or she masters the new position, severance pay, and overtime for faculty to teach courses left uncovered when a faculty member leaves.

Because of the many costs associated with recruiting a new faculty member, getting him or her up to speed, and dealing with separation, it is important to look to retention efforts as a cost-saving move rather than an additional expenditure. “Not everyone can teach online; it really is a different skill set,” says Sikorski. “The care and feeding of adjunct faculty should be looked at right away.”

Opportunity Costs of Faculty Turnover
Even more significant, in Betts’s opinion, are the opportunity costs associated with faculty and staff attrition. Opportunity costs, Sikorski and Betts write, are costs associated with “loss of business and loss of students resulting from diminished resources and/or decreased service quality due to faculty/adjunct turnover/attrition.” This category encompasses costs from loss of business, loss of students, loss of faculty/adjuncts, and loss of reputation.

Loss of students and the consequent loss of reputation is the element that Betts finds most dangerous. “Once you start losing students, you can’t seem to stop it,” she says. “Online students are savvy. They will call and want to speak to students and faculty. If there is any sense that there is attrition [they won’t attend]. You can’t get reputation back,” she says.

These opportunity costs can result in other damage to the program or the university beyond the loss of students and reputation. Faculty and staff attrition, if serious enough, can lead to limitations on course offerings due to lack of staff, a decrease in research and publication coming from the school, decreases in donations, and even loss of accreditation.

Indirect Costs of Faculty Turnover
Indirect costs, which Sikorski and Betts define as costs relating to “productivity, morale, and ultimately the climate of the university,” are the most difficult to quantify, but they still play an important role in understanding the impact attrition has on the bottom line. Examples of this category of costs includes lower staff productivity and burnout from covering for colleagues that have left, inability to secure grants, mistakes made by new hires, and low morale on the part of faculty and students.

“When people see a lack of productivity, it can put your program in a negative space,” says Sikorski. And lack of productivity can also come from missing staff. Betts tells of an example of losing an academic advisor, which negatively impacted the program during the six to eight weeks that it took to recruit a new person, in addition to the time it took to bring the next person up to speed. During this time, new students especially, who require a lot of attention, did not have the resources they needed to help them be successful. “Staff are just as important or more so than faculty because they have daily contact with students,” Betts says.

Excerpted from How Much is Faculty Turnover Costing You?, Distance Education Report, May 15, 2008.

Such was the case at an online seminar titled High-Level Online Faculty Support for Low-Level Cost. The presenter was Kaye Shelton, dean of online education for Dallas Baptist University, and during the 75-minute seminar she shared her model for cost-effective faculty support.

Dallas Baptist offers approximately 275 online graduate and undergraduate courses each semester. The school employs about 130 full-time instructors with the rest of the course load picked up by adjuncts. Shelton’s support staff includes seven full-time and five part-time employees, plus a handful of tech-savvy student workers. This “ProfHelp” team, as it’s known, assists with everything from instructional design to technical support – anything an instructor needs to be successful in the online environment.

1. Keep in mind how important faculty are to overall program success. If they are well supported, they will be more confident using the technology with their students and students will be more satisfied.
2. Create a website that organizes resources that faculty may easily access such as www.onlineteachingtips.org.
3. Utilize graduate students who need flexible work hours as support staff for course design and editing.
4. Provide examples of exemplary online course design so that instructors can see the big picture.
5. Provide access to quality online course rubrics such as Quality Matters and Cal State Chico’s rubric.
6. Offer a peer mentoring program that links inexperienced faculty with experienced faculty.
7. Use free open source software products for image editing such as GIMP and instructor-to-student course communication such as DimDim.
8. Provide tutorials and demonstrations online which may be created with free products such as Jing.
9. Keep faculty abreast of new methods and technology by offering a monthly newsletter via email or the web.
10. Provide support for multimedia authoring such as creating audio-enhanced PowerPoint slides and interactive learning objects.


]]> http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/helping-online-faculty-succeed/feed/ 0 http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/usability-issues-that-impact-online-learning/ http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/instructional-design/usability-issues-that-impact-online-learning/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:35:44 +0000 Patti Shank, PhD, CPT http://www.facultyfocus.com/?p=3151 Despite the benefits of online education, there are inevitable frustrations as well. The tools online learners need to use take time to master and don’t always behave in intuitive ways. Waiting for a response to a question, work from another learner on a collaborative project, or feedback on an assignment also can be terribly frustrating.

Because the online learning experience is, by its nature, frustrating, anyone who can take remove any unnecessary frustration should do so. Frustration leads to anxiety, a reduced ability to learn, and attrition.

What it comes down to is technical and learning usability — the ease (or lack of ease) with which learners interact with online instructional materials (pages, forms, media, etc.) and people (the instructor, peers, help sources). Good usability for online learning materials means the site, content, and media are easy to find, use, and navigate. And good usability for people means the interaction tools (such as email and discussion forums) are easy to use and facilitate getting input or help as needed.

Technical Usability in Online Courses
Good technical usability involves minimizing system-related frustrations so learners can use them for their intended purpose without unnecessary hassles, delays, or extra steps. Here are some common recommendations for improving technical usability in online courses:

• Use a simple and consistent navigation scheme (for example, tabs labeled with the week number or topic containing all the materials for that week or topic).
• Optimize images and media for quicker downloading.
• Provide a list of required hardware, software, plug-ins, and bandwidth to prospective students so they know what’s needed, technically, to succeed.
• Offer printable versions of pages that are likely to be printed, either by providing separate print versions or PDFs or by making sure that existing pages print well.
• Design online courses so they function similarly to each other. Once learners understand how to use one course, they will be able to use others more easily.
• Make materials or pages that are commonly used or referred to readily available without having to navigate through numerous menus and hyperlinks.

Learning Usability in Online Courses
Learning usability is about minimizing unnecessary learning-related frustrations so learners can learn and deal with the frustrations that cannot be eliminated. Here are some common recommendations for improving learning usability in online courses:
• Manage expectations: Tell learners when to expect a reply to emails or questions so they aren’t frustrated when you haven’t answered in three minutes.
• Make help available: Look at your course content and activities realistically. Any places where students are likely to get stuck? Provide extra help options at these times.
• Provide reality checks: Let prospective students know what to expect so they can determine if they have the access, motivation, and time for the coursework.

Maybe you’re thinking this is too much to worry about. It’s hard enough designing content, activities, and assessments; facilitating course activities; answering questions; and grading papers and tests. But since the negative outcomes from poor usability end up in the instructors’ and students’ laps, it’s our problem, whether we like it or not.


Patti Shank, PhD, CPT, is a nationally recognized instructional technologist, designer and developer, and the president of Learning Peaks.

Adapted from Online Teaching Fundamentals: (Not) Making it Hard(er) to Learn, Part 3, Online Classroom, vol. 7, no. 5.



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