Community

Nancy Levenburg, Grand Valley State University
levenbun at gvsu.edu

Over the past few years, the number of courses delivered in whole or in part via the Internet has increased exponentially with the percentage of online students at many institutions at now fifteen percent or higher. In online versus face-to-face courses, numerous reports convey consistently high quality levels in asynchronous online discussions (e.g., Ryan et al., 1999) and no significant difference in terms of students' performance and academic achievement in online versus face-to-face courses. While this is good news, concern about higher student attrition rates for online courses has also emerged. Although national statistics do not yet exist, studies by some individual institutions suggest that online education suffers from completion rates that range from 50 to 90 percent below their traditionally delivered, face-to-face counterparts. This is troubling.

Are there proactive strategies that faculty and administrators can adopt to increase online retention rates? If we consider students who fail to complete online courses or programs as dissatisfied customers - those whose expectations about the course or program were not met - we can examine the design and delivery of online courses from a marketing perspective (Levenburg, 2001). The goal is to adopt strategies that build "program equity" by keeping good students enrolled both in individual courses (i.e., course completion) and within programs (i.e., retention).

Online Learners

Most studies that have been conducted to date indicate that online learners are most likely to be relatively older, employed learners who lead busy lives and are subject to the pressures imposed by an array of work, personal, and social obligations. Online courses may appeal to these students for convenience reasons, which means that their enrollment may be driven by needs unrelated to their skills and abilities to be successful. Consequently, these students may be more likely to have insecurities about their learning environment (e.g., the difficulty of the course and program, the extent of support available, the nature of the media used, course pacing or scheduling, or the amount and nature of interaction and feedback with the instructor and other students). They may withdraw if they perceive the course content as irrelevant or of little value to their careers or personal interests, if the course is too difficult and takes too much time or effort, if they receive inadequate assistance when frustrated, or if they feel "isolated." As a result, it is important to identify where and why perceptual differences and gaps occur and to offer courses in a supportive environment.

Faculty/Student Relationships

One important way to positively impact course completion rates is to build relationships with online students. Some faculty members may shy away from this due to time commitments; however, there are some easy tactics that instructors can adopt right from the start of the course, such as by making virtual "eye contact" with each learner. Just as retail employees know that making eye contact with each visitor entering a store is not only the single biggest deterrent to shoplifting but also the most important step toward encouraging a sale, instructors should greet their online students promptly. A "Welcome To Our Course" e-mail at the inception of the course may be one way to invite learners into a dialogue and help to assure a successful start. As the course progresses, Palloff and Pratt (1999) recommend paying attention to which students are not posting messages, and taking appropriate actions to follow up; instructors "need to remind students about their responsibility to participate, either by posting messages to that effect on their course site or through individual contact" (p. 38).

Another way to increase course completion rates is to address the perceived lack of contact with the instructor. While this may not present a serious challenge for the instructor who is teaching both face-to-face and online courses and maintains on-campus office hours, the issue becomes more relevant when the instructor is not regularly in her/his on-campus office. To respond to this potential concern, instructors may want to consider posting a photograph of themselves and provide learners with their e-mail address and telephone number. Scheduling conferences with students via the telephone can often serve the same purpose as when conducted face-to-face. Alternatively, some instructors adopt "virtual office hours" when they promise to be online or otherwise available to students (e.g., chat rooms). Virtual office hours, if adopted, should be determined with care. If learners are scattered across several time zones and the instructor selects 8:00 to 10:00 a.m. EST on Mondays and Wednesdays as her/his virtual office hours, it is entirely possible that s/he will never conveniently accommodate learners' schedules for those who reside in the western United States. Worse yet, depending on learners' geographic locations, virtual office hours may furnish a relative "advantage" to learners who are in time zones that are near the instructor's. This could represent a distinct disadvantage and source of dissatisfaction to learners who live in time zones that are dissimilar to the instructor's.

In any case, it can be helpful and reassuring to learners to know approximately when they can expect to receive a reply from their instructor. Therefore, instructors should take care to avoid promising more than they can deliver. Response times ranging from 24 to 48 hours are generally acceptable to learners, with longer turnaround times for grading assignments, exams, and so forth.

One tactic that is often used for relationship building in online classes is to establish a discussion folder/forum for conversations that are not related to the course. In face-to-face courses, students talk about a variety of things: past course content (e.g., "how did you do on the exam?"), present course content (e.g., "did you do the homework for today?"), and future course content (e.g., "have you started working on the project yet?"). They also discuss "life in general" topics, such as movies, concerts, televisions sit-coms, and so on. By creating a virtual place (e.g., "The Coffee Shop") for those types of conversations and participating in them, faculty members can go a long way towards building relationships with students.

Formative evaluation can provide the instructor with information regarding the extent to which students are successfully progressing in their studies and how well they are achieving course goals and objectives. Additionally, if the course is learner-centered, the instructor will want to know how well the assignments and tasks meet the learning needs of students, so that appropriate adjustments can be considered. Therefore, the instructor should seek feedback regularly, and should begin doing so early in the course. Some Web conferencing/course authorware products facilitate soliciting feedback more than others. As an example, Blackboard/CourseInfo offers a survey feature that records students' responses anonymously. This software also offers instructors the ability to offer an "anonymous posting" alternative for threaded discussions. Where anonymous posting is not available, one alternative is to assign certain students the task of collecting and summarizing feedback from their classmates. Collection and summarization duties could be rotated on a weekly basis across enrolled students. Alternatively, if graduate assistants are available, they could be used to collect and forward feedback to the instructor.

Summary

While an institution's current expertise and experience base with traditionally-delivered courses and programs certainly provides a strong foundation, both instructors and students need to possess or acquire additional skill sets in order to achieve the same degree of success in distance learning environments. As in the traditional classroom, instructors are still the content-experts, but they must, in addition, be skilled in facilitation techniques and building relationships with students. Specific recommendations (summarized in Table 1) have been presented that should be heeded by faculty members who are teaching online courses.

Table 1

Tips for Facilitating Faculty/Student Relationships

· Establish virtual "eye contact" with students.

Send a warm e-mail message during the first week of the class.

Make all students feel that they are important.

· Establish expected response times.

Students generally consider 24 to 48 hours as acceptable.

· Solicit periodic feedback from students. Take advantage of the Internet's ability to easily and anonymously obtain feedback.

· Be sensitive and responsive to expressions of overload. Don't ignore students' expressions of confusion or frustration.

· Establish user-friendly office hours. Don't establish office hours (on-campus or virtual) that will be convenient for only some of the learners. Make sure office hours are convenient for all learners.

· Provide complete contact information for the instructor, including an e-mail address and telephone number.

· Create a "Coffee Shop" or "Water Cooler." Provide a forum for non-course-related conversations.

References

Levenburg, N.M. (2001), "e-Learning Initiatives: Driving Up Course Completion Rates," Working Paper.

Palloff, R.M. and K. Pratt (1999), Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Ryan, M., K.H. Carlton, and N.S. Ali (1999), "Evaluation of Traditional Classroom Teaching Methods Versus Delivery via the World Wide Web" [online]. Journal of Nursing Education, Volume 38, Number 6. Available from PROQUEST database at: http://proquest.umi.com