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!

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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.

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Just a quick call to a student to see how things are going, even if it’s only a message on his or her answering machine, goes a long way in creating a more personalized learning environment.

“Students need to feel like they know their instructor and that you’re interested in how they’re doing,” says Mandernach, noting that these random calls make such a favorable impression on students that they always comment on it in their course evaluations.

Student engagement is important in any class, but it takes on greater significance in the online learning environment where students are not only isolated from their instructor and fellow students, but must be disciplined enough to ward off distractions and other commitments that compete for their time.

According to Mandernach, an online course promotes optimal student cognitive engagement if it:

1. integrates active learning environments with authentic learning tasks;
2. fosters a personal connection with the class (teacher-student as well as student-student); and
3. facilitates the process of learning in an online environment.

One of the first steps in facilitating a successful online learning experience for students is to manage expectations. At the start of each course, Mandernach asks her students to write down what they expect from her. She, in turn, responds with answers to whether these expectations are on target, and also explains what she expects from her students. Not only does this set the tone for the course and prevent misunderstandings, but since she began doing it her online course retention has increased 10 percent.

Stacey Williams, distance learning council co-chair and director of distance learning at Naugatuck Valley Community College, uses video clips to prompt discussion and says that her retention rates and student satisfaction have improved as a result. The key is to use these video clips within the context of scaffolding assignments rather than as stand-alone course elements.

Each unit in Williams’ courses incorporates the following elements:

• Learning objectives—These serve as a guide in selecting appropriate readings, activities, and video clips. To make these objectives clear to students, Williams sends them to students as either weekly email or pop-up announcements. The advantage of using pop-up announcements is that students have to do something with them (either close them or move them out of the way) before proceeding to the course activities, which increases the likelihood that they will read them.
• Readings—These include textbook and online readings found in library databases on real companies.
• PowerPoint—The PowerPoint slides emphasize the key concepts covered in the readings. “Whatever they didn’t get from the readings, the PowerPoint will hopefully bring out for them and make it a little easier to focus on the relevant key points,” Williams says.
• Concept quiz—After the PowerPoint presentation, Williams has students do practice assignments, typically multiple-choice or true/false quizzes. “They tend to do those practice tests or quizzes a little bit more readily when it’s a safe environment, so I keep those as a tool just for them,” Williams says.
• Video clips—Williams uses brief (up to five-minute) video clips from sources such as corporate websites, textbook publishers, MERLOT, You Tube and Teacher Tube. “One of the biggest challenges is finding videos to use in a streaming format, but I do like the challenge of going out and finding them,” Williams says.
• Class Discussion—After viewing a video clip, students participate in a discussion based on the video. Williams typically asks students two questions based on the content of the video clip, and they are required to respond with a minimum of two paragraphs and responses to at least two classmates. “This gets the conversation going. It simulates what happens in a classroom, and it does tend to draw out the students who wouldn’t necessarily participate in a discussion in person. For me, it becomes a key part of an online course,” Williams says.

Excerpted from Using Video Clips to Stimulate Discussion, Online Classroom, Nov. 2007.

Special Report: Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction

Despite the tremendous growth of distance education, retention remains its Achilles’ heel. Estimates of the failed retention rate for distance education undergraduates range from 20 to 50 percent. Distance education administrators believe the failed retention rate for online courses may be 10 to 20 percent higher than for face-to-face courses. Failure to address online course retention will have a significant impact on a program’s bottom line and ability to grow.

If you’re looking for smart strategies that will help you stem the tide of online student attrition, you’ll want to download this FREE special report: Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction.

Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction

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As an increasing number of colleges and universities identify online education as a critical component to their long-term strategy, the issue of retention can no longer be ignored. It is mandatory for everyone who touches the distance learner to understand why these students leave their online courses, and what it will take to keep them there.

Featuring a collection of top articles from Distance Education Report, this new Faculty Focus Special Report provides practical strategies for improving online student retention, engagement and satisfaction. Articles include:

• 11 Tips for Improving Retention of Distance Learning Students
• Understanding the Impact of Attrition on Your School
• Taking a Holistic View of Student Retention
• Eight Suggestions to Help You Get Your Retention Act Together Now
• Online Mentoring Builds Retention
• Nine Truths about Recruitment and Retention
• Finding Helpful Patterns in Student Engagement
• Reducing the Risk: Effects of a First Year Experience Course for Non-Traditional Students
• Service Center: A Strategy to Promote Student Retention

Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction

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With the strategic importance of distance education courses on the rise, this report will help you understand the key variables that impact the retention of your web-based students and adopt proactive strategies proven to mitigate potential retention problems.

Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction is yours free when you sign up for Faculty Focus, a new online information resource for faculty in the higher education industry.

Faculty Focus contains a wealth of valuable material – not just about online retention strategies, but all of today’s hot button issues that are important to faculty and administrators. It’s packed with ideas, best practices, analyses and other information you can use on the topics that impact your students, your school and your work, including:

• Instructional Design
• Faculty Development
• Distance Learning
• Classroom Management
• Educational Assessment
• Faculty Evaluation
• Learning Styles
• Curriculum Development
• Community College Issues
• Trends in Higher Education
• Learning Communities
• And much, much more.

If you’re worried about losing your online students, you’ll want to get your hands on Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction, a special report developed to give you the strategies you need to keep your students engaged and enrolled.

Strategies for Increasing Online Student Retention and Satisfaction

Download your copy of this report today! It's FREE to Faculty Focus members.

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A goal of equitable facilitation of online discussions is the promotion of a safety net and the provision of opportunities to freely express one’s ideas, feelings, and experiences in an online discussion forum. The hope is that this will ensure respect for diversity and other important issues as well as promote reflection and better understanding. Based on Dr. Joyce Kaser’s publication, “Equity in On-line Professional Development: A Guide to E-learning That Works for Everyone” (2004), I describe briefly the suggestions discussed for facilitating issues of equity in online courses.

1. Monitor the course to make sure that the equity content is accurate and comprehensive. The facilitator is the individual who must be aware of possible stereotypes and biases embedded in the course and who is able to examine and analyze these issues in light of what is being discussed in the course and the forum.

2. Establish early an environment that enables participants to be safe and secure. This could come from the type of learning the group is participating in as well as the facilitator’s style of engagement. The facilitator could provide the ground rules, including the right to ask questions and to respond in ways that are respectful of one another. The facilitator could also take the discussion to a deeper level or move to the exploration of issues with equity implications.

4. Monitor the level of trust that exists. The facilitator is the agent who promotes the building of trust among participants. At the same time, the facilitator makes sure that any sensitive issue that becomes a point of discussion and exploration within the course is appropriate for the level of trust within the group. When several of the participants post messages and no one dominates the discussion in any significant way, it is possible that participants trust one another to express what’s on their minds.

5. Note your own hesitancy about exploring any aspect of equity. The facilitator should ask him/herself what his/her personal biases or fears might be that may interfere with effective facilitation. These issues may result in the facilitator’s avoidance of certain salient topics or discomfort when participants raise points related to those topics. In such an instance, the facilitator could raise his/her reservations to the group, making this a learning opportunity for everyone.

Excerpted from 5 Suggestions for Equitable Online Facilitation, Online Classroom, October 2006.