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Educators increasingly wary of online course retention

Academic leaders are more worried about retention rates in online courses now than they have been in at least a decade, a new report said.

retention-online-course [1]Forty-one percent of chief academic officers said they agreed that retaining students was a greater problem for online courses than for face-to-face classes.

Only 28 percent of respondents felt this way about retention in 2009, and only 27 percent concurred in 2004.

The concerns about student retention [2] were highlighted in a recent survey [3] conducted by Babson Survey Research Group, Pearson, and the Sloan Consortium. The survey featured nearly 3,000 institutions responding to questions about online learning.

“Comparing the retention in online courses to those in face-to-face courses is not simple or easy,” the report’s authors wrote. “Online courses can attract students who might otherwise have not been able to attend traditional on-campus instruction because of work, family, or other obligations.”

Low retention rates [4] have been at the center of the debate surrounding massive open online courses (MOOCs).

The average completion rate for non-credit MOOCs is between seven and 10 percent. When San Jose State University and Udacity partnered to offer for-credit MOOCs last year, as much as 75 percent of students failed [5] some of the courses.

More than 60 percent of the students were not enrolled in a degree program at the university. Out of the matriculated San Jose State students taking the remedial math MOOC, every one of them had previously failed a remedial math class.

More than three-quarters of students enrolled in the MOOCs were balancing school work with jobs, the university said.

And these demographics characterize many forms of online learning, not just MOOCs.

While the majority of “traditional” students on college campuses are in their late teens and early twenties, those taking online courses tend be adult learners with families and jobs.

The average age of students at the online-only Western Governors University [6], for example, is 36. A 2012 survey of online courses [7], sponsored by the Learning House and Aslanian Market Research, found that the average entirely-online student is 33 years old and fully employed.

“This difference in the nature of the student body confounds direction comparisons,” the authors of the Babson survey wrote. “If students are more likely to drop out of an online course because of work or family commitments, does that reflect on the nature of the course, or the nature of the student?”

Follow Jake New on Twitter at @eCN_Jake [8].