North American Web Developers Conference, October 1998:
There are many ways to measure whether a learner is successful in the online (asynchronous, Web-based) classroom. One of the most basic is completion rate of courses; it is easily measurable, and the focus of this study.
Prior research showed that completion rate of online courses is generally lower than the completion rate of face-to-face classroom courses (Hiltz 1997). Why is this? It is important to understand contributing factors in completion for online learning, and what course designers and instructors can do to improve it. This is not a new problem. Correspondence courses have dealt with the same issue for 150 years, but there are as yet few satisfactory solutions.
To find out why people did not finish online courses, I performed a case study analysis of an online, non-credit, paying workshop that taught participants how to create their own online courses. The workshop lasted for eight weeks, with 250 participants and 8 facilitators.
General factors found from the literature review are summarized below. These factors were compared to those that would be found from the results of the study.
Results from the study find that the three most important factors keeping students from completing the workshop are technology skills and access, fostering a community of practice, and timing issues (with timeframe being the most important). Specific suggestions for improvement to the online workshop included reducing class size, adding more facilitators, allowing extra time in specific portions of the workshop and less in others, and defining clear prerequisites for taking the workshop.
While these improvements are specific to the case study involved, I speculate that they may be valuable to design of other online courses. Even if a person taking an online course has a supervisor that will decrease their work load, a computer with fast Internet access, and works well in an independent study setting, there is still no guarantee of course completion. Results from this study support nearly all of the observations and recommendations from the literature, and future studies can further explore selected factors. Also, further studies might address other ways of assessing outcomes in the online environment.
For further information, refer to the complete text of the study (http://random.ltc.vanderbilt.e du/comprate/).
Keywords: www, NAWEB, NAWeb98, completion rate, dropout rate, assessment, web, online course, online learning, netcourses.
Carolyn Gale
Research Associate, Learning Technology Center
Vanderbilt University
Peabody Box 45
Nashville, TN 37203
carolyn@relax.com
http://peabody.vanderbilt.e
du/ctrs/ltc/galec/