Motivating And Retaining Online Students

Finally, the first research-based book of sound strategies and best practices to help instructors motivate students to complete their online courses. Although studies support the effectiveness of learning online, students often fail to complete online courses. Some studies have found that as many as 50–70% drop out of their online courses or programs. Retention is not only a growing expectation and imperative, but it is also as opportunity for faculty members to take the lead in innovating, researching, and implementing new strategies while demonstrating their effectiveness. Designed for instructors and instructional designers, Motivating and Retaining Online Students is filled with empirical research from the authors’ study of motivation and retention strategies that can reduce online learner dropout. Focusing on the most important issues instructors face, such as course design; student engagement and motivation; and institutional, instructional, and informal student support strategies, the book provides effective online strategies that help minimize student dropout, increase student retention, and support student learning. While helping to improve the overall retention rates for educational institutions, the strategies outlined in the book also allow for student diversity and individual learner differences. Lehman and Conceição’s proven model gives instructors an effective approach to help students persist in online courses and succeed as learners.

Motivation is central to all things human. Online teaching and learning is no different. In the early years of the Web, however, students experienced extremely dry online content, affectionately known as “shovelware.” Over time, learners were increasingly inundated by bland content and unimaginative activities. Worse, too often they accepted it as reality. In the process, online learning became highly lock-step and mechanized. There was no room for flexibility, choice, or creative expression of any kind.Unfortunately, most online content remains lifeless today. Legions of learners are interminably bored. Part of the reason is that their online and blended courses fail to effectively utilize the smartphones, tablets, and other wireless and mobile technologies strapped to their bodies or contained in their tote bags. At this very moment, tens of millions of learners around the planet are navigating through seemingly endless pages of their online courses. Unfortunately, most of these learners are swimming in this sea of content without much hope for interaction, collaboration, or engagement. The emergence of massive open online courses or MOOCs with tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of learners in a single course has made the present situation even more prominent and precarious.We propose the TEC-VARIETY framework as a solution to the lack of meaningful engagement. It can shift learners from highly comatose states to extremely engaged ones. Adding some TEC-VARIETY helps instructors to focus on how to motivate online learners and increase learner retention. It also is a comprehensive, one stop toolkit for online instructors to inspire learners and renew their own passion for teaching. Using ten theoretically-driven and proven motivational principles, TEC-VARIETY offers over a 100 practical yet innovative ideas based on decades of author experience teaching in a variety of educational settings.In this book, you will discover:• A wellspring of Web resources • 10 highly documented successful motivational principles• Hundreds of activities to motivate and engage online learners• Proven ideas on how to design interactive and collaborative courses• A realistic path toward meaningful and relevant online learning• Detailed risk, cost, and time guidelines for each activity• A highly researched basis for each idea and activity• Hope (yes real hope!) for engaging online learners

Supporting Online Students shows how effective and efficiently delivered support services improve academic success and course retention for online learners. Drawing on a decade's worth of research, Anita Crawley describes the scope of services from admissions and registration to advising and student engagement. The book includes guidelines and standards, planning and implementation, innovative practices, and describes specialized services needed by particular online student groups. "Effective student support is the single most important factor in sustaining high-quality online learning programs. Anita Crawley presents the most effective guide to achieving that success. Her book is a blueprint for building thriving online programs through comprehensive student support." Ray Schroeder, director, Center for Online Learning, Research and Service, University of Illinois Springfield "As distance learning continues to grow, this book addresses the often neglected other side of the coin: online student services. This book provides a great introduction and overview of the research, literature, and innovative practices for planning, implementing, and evaluating support services for online learners." George Steele, director, eStudent Services, OhioLearns "Anita Crawley has crafted a splendid volume on a topic of increasing importance in contemporary higher education. Her book promises to be the foundational piece for those who work with students in an online environment. Her thinking and analysis are superb and undoubtedly will provide the basis upon which to develop online programs and services in the future." John H. Schuh, Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Emeritus, Iowa State University "Bringing together extensive examples of innovative practices, summaries of current research, and a wealth of experience in student services, Anita Crawley's comprehensive guide to supporting online students is a rich resource for institutions with existing, growing, or new online programs. Diane J. Goldsmith, former executive director, Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium

This work explores and explicates learner motivation in online learning environments. More specifically, it uses a case-study approach to examine undergraduate students’ motivation within two formal and separate online learning contexts. In doing so, it recognizes the mutually constitutive relationship of the learner and the learning environment in relation to motivation. This is distinctive from other approaches that tend to focus on designing and creating motivating environments or, alternatively, concentrate on motivation as a stable learner characteristic. In particular, this book identifies a range of factors that can support or undermine learner motivation and discusses each in detail. By unraveling the complexity of learner motivation in such environments, it provides useful guidelines for teachers, instructional designers and academic advisors tasked with building and teaching within online educational contexts.

Ormond Simpson provides a clear, accessible analysis of strategies for increasing retention and, crucially, provides case studies and examples to illustrate how these strategies can change institutional policy and practice.

Published in association with While higher education has rarely employed ROI methodology—focusing more on balancing its revenue streams, such as federal, state, and local appropriations, tuition, and endowments with its costs—the rapid growth of online education and the history of how it has evolved, with its potential for institutional transformation and as a major source of revenue, as well as its need for substantial and long-term investment, makes the use of ROI an imperative. This book both demonstrates how ROI is a critical tool for strategic planning and outlines the process for determining ROI.The book’s expert contributors lay the foundation for developing new practices to meet the compelling challenges of online education and identify new models that offer the potential for transforming the educational system, meeting new workforce demands, and ultimately improving the economy. The opening chapters of the book explore the dimensions of ROI as a strategic planning process, offering guiding principles as well as methods of measurement and progress tracking, and demonstrate the impact of ROI across the institution.The book identifies the role of previously overlooked constituents—such as online professionals as critical partners for developing institutional strategy and institutional stakeholders for vital input on inclusivity, diversity, and equity—and their increasingly important role in impacting the ROI of online programs.Subsequent chapters offer a range of approaches to ROI reflecting the strategic priorities and types of return institutions seek from their investment in online programming, whether they be increased profits or surpluses via reduced expenses or increased operating efficiencies or the development of increased brand awareness for their programs. They also address the growing competitive environment of recent commercial entrants and online program managers (OPMs). The contributors offer best practices for setting goals and identifying benchmarks for increasing and measuring payback, including the creation of cross-functional ROI teams from across an institution; and further address the advantages and disadvantages of universities partnering with external providers, or even other colleges and universities, to provide online programs with them and for them. This book offers presidents and senior administrators, faculty engaged in shared governance, online learning administrators, and stakeholders representing student, community and employer interests with a rigorous process for developing an online strategy.

The integration of new technology and global collaboration has undoubtedly transformed learning in higher education from the traditional classroom setting into a domain of support services, academic programs, and educational products which are made available to learners. The Handbook of Research on Transnational Higher Education is a unique compilation of the most recent research done by higher education professionals in the areas of policy, governance, technology, marketing, and leadership development. This publication succeeds in highlighting the most important strategies and policies for professionals, policymakers, administrators, and researchers interested in higher education management.

Uses case studies, surveys, and literature reviews to critically examine how these technologies are being used to improve writing and publishing skills, and literacy create engaging communities of practice, and as experiential learning tools. This volume discusses frameworks for deploying and assessing the effectiveness of these technologies.