Episode 191: Student Retention Through Online Learning

The University of Louisville empowers students with over 50 fully online degrees and certificates in areas like Business, Public Health, Social Work, Engineering and more. Flexible coursework allows time to focus on all of life's priorities. Learn more at lawble.edu/online From the University of Central Florida's Center for Distributed Learning and the University of Louisville's Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning. I'm Tom Kavanaugh and I'm Kelvin Thompson. And you are listening to Topcast, the final 15 episodes of Topcast, the Teaching Online Podcast. Final 15 scheduled episode, Dr. Kevin. Of course, of course, that's what I meant to say. Yeah, for those who maybe have been skipping some episodes, how dare you. We are in the home stretch here. We're winding down the official scheduled episodes of Topcast to conclude at the end of the calendar year of 2025. And we've got something special planned for our final episode at OLC Accelerate in lovely Orlando, Florida, so we hope you'll be able to join us there. Yeah, and if you didn't get the message, we'll put a link in the show notes. Love to hear your, we'll put some info on it, but love to hear some questions or comments that you'd like to have featured in that recorded live plenary panel that we're calling, I'm calling, I don't know, it says it on the program, last call at the Topcast Cafe. I like it. I do like that. Yeah, that's I'll give you credit for that. Well, credit or blame, two sides of a boy. Yeah. So, Calvin, before we hit record, I did see you with your little cup. I won't say what's in the thermos, but what's in the travel cup. My coffee today, Tom, came to me rather conveniently as I walked right next door to the newly renovated cafe that they're calling Established 1927 by Marigold or Est 1927 by Marigold in the beautiful Speed Art Museum here in Louisville, it's right next door to my office. And I've been looking forward to getting back in there because the pathway was recently cleared of construction obstacles, so I didn't, you know, have to go a whole bunch out of my way, which I was too lazy to do. This coffee is a blend called Buckle Down from a Nashville, Tennessee coffee roaster, good citizen coffee company branded in partnership with eighth and roast coffee company. And I think it's pretty good. It's not bad at all. They're pretty proud of it in the cafe. I wonder what you're drinking and I wonder if you can find a connection to today's topic in my cup. Well, I'm drinking as we like to say the deconstructed coffee. Coffee clear. But I did have a giant mug this morning, so I'm about caffeine doubt. Connection, connection you say. You know, you talk about that there were obstacles on your pathway. I will say that the name of that cafe is a mouthful. Well, trippingly off the top. No, it does not. But what they were to go, I read it because I was like, what is that? And I looked it up and so the established 1927 is a reference to the museum itself, which was established in 1927. So they're trying to, you know, be buddy-ish, I guess. Does that something to do with with the race track there? I assume the horse track speed. No, it's a family name. Big family name. I too wondered about all that stuff. In the museum, there's some old stuff. It's fascinating. There's speeds that go back to the Lincoln administration. And so there's like silver place settings that, I don't know, secretary of whatever somebody's speed had in DC and all kinds of stuff like that. I'm cool. I was thinking about my experience going to the museum in Daytona. Yeah, I don't know, Calvin. I'm drawing a bit of a blank. You need to take me by the end of this part. The obstacle thing was in my mind as was the immediate convenience of pop next door or pull off the shelf. And good Lord, there's a lot of brands and my little soliloquy there in a personal connection that keeps you coming back. I thought all that stuff, you know, maybe was in the stew of the topics that we're going to touch on today. Okay, I can see it. I can see it. I think there is a bit of a stretch, but I can see it. Yeah, well, tenuous line, I think going through that. As long as it as long as it doesn't snap, it's okay. You want to share with the audience, you know, what that connection is? Well, I'll give it a shot. So similar to past episodes in which we springboarded from a chapter of the sage handbook of online higher education, a pull off the shelf reference to guide our podcast conversation about important key topics and the work of online and digital higher education. Today, we're going to turn our attention to the important goal of student retention, partially at least guided by chapter 46 from the sage handbook student recruitment, retention and completion strategies really tackling the middle of that title, the retention part. That chapter was authored by Dr. Lorraine Narea, Narea, I think. Check out the show notes page for links to past episodes drawing upon other chapters for inspiration and for a direct link to the sage handbook itself. Yeah, awesome. So you mentioned retention. Retention. Sort of where we're where we're kind of doing a core sample through that chapter. And I think that's an interesting one, because so much emphasis is put on enrollment and registration and preventing melt and how many students are we going to get this semester? And look, I'm as guilty of that as anybody. I'd look at those numbers. I have them reported to me on a weekly basis. But, you know, as they say, it's cheaper to keep a student and get a new student. So that's right. And, you know, isn't that our job is to try to keep and graduate these students? That's the goal. It's not just to sign them up. It's, you know, sign them up faster than they drop out. That's not good. You may be getting a lot of students, but if you don't have good retention, like how successful is your program really? So I think that's a good, that's a good area to concentrate on. And probably one we don't really talk about enough, at least in our business, I know it's a whole effort in, like, you know, student affairs and enrollment management. And if it's a strategic enrollment management kind of approach. Yeah, I mean, I think all that's true. And then I do think that a lot of our quality assurance efforts really are in support of keeping our students. I really do, you know, but I think you're right. Unless there's a really, like here we've been talking a lot about retention and under the broader heading of student success and so forth. But yeah, I think, I think the spotlight is stolen quite often by recruitment, marketing, enrollment, those kinds of things. And I like to say, well, and you know, unless you're at 100%, there's a hole in your bucket, you know, better to plug the hole than to pour more water into it. You know, yeah. Both, both are important. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, something that I know you highlighted as we were preparing for this episode is Dr. Nareus, this concept, her treatment of relational marketing, which is kind of, you know, framed as centering on and adding value to the student as a customer. Uh-huh. But it's also under, it's got this concept of the quality of the product is a retention strategy. Yeah. So the quality of the online courses that students are taking, if it's better, students will stay and retain. And I would also argue that they'll also kind of to the relational part of this, they'll use word of mouth and tell their friends and others that this has been a good experience. And you know, that's free advertising and the best kind of advertising that you can get. And it's, and I've never really thought of course quality in that context, if I can be transparent. I mean, we spend a lot of time talking about course quality and it's something we care a lot about. But I haven't thought about it as a retention strategy per se, which I think is our really interesting concept. It's definitely something I've been trying to socialize a lot here, as an aspiration and as a reason to focus evidence-based. practices and course design and teaching, right? Because we want to do right by our students. It's not just make things pretty or make ourselves feel good by checking off boxes. It's toward an end. But yeah, I think it's understandable what you said. Where our attention goes other places sometimes. I think if you'll indulge me, I was thinking just to kind of anchor this down a little bit, broadly a couple of literature citations here. One, I've mentioned multiple times in the past because it's a study that's one of my favorite to cite. Tonya Justin and Rachel Cassadus's 2019 study speaks to course design and impacts on students. And one of my favorite quotes is design is the most influential measure of instructional characteristics and potentially increases student outcomes. Specifically, effort should be made to determine the types of learning objectives, align activities with learning objectives and organize the overall course by instructors and instructional designers. Unquote, and it's a very robust study. Looks at all kinds of stuff, but it's the design element that they articulate making that impact. And then less of a study and more of a literature review, Bawa and a 2019 2016 article notes the importance of online course design in affecting student retention specifically, while a number of specific factors are discussed, Bawa states, quote, "a key reason for high attrition rates in online courses is related to ineffective course designs that are created based on assumptions about the online learner." So just to ground us a little bit, I think those are excellent points. - Yeah, I totally agree. And of course, it's completely consistent with what we hear directly from students and have always heard. I don't know if students have that language to articulate it the way it's said there, but we hear things like, if the course structure is consistent and I know what the expectations are from a week to week and they don't change on me, then I will be more successful in the course. And in some ways, that's another way of saying, maybe more simplified, reductive way of saying, the same thing that these scholars are saying. Things as simple, I wouldn't even classify this as instructional design, but things as simple as having a consistent amount of work from week to week in the modules, having all of the assignments always do at the same time on the same day in the week so that they can plan their week around it. Like just things like that, that if you don't do completely, frustrates and I think adds to the lack of student success. - Yeah, totally agree. I mean, I think of that as like predictability and who doesn't want predictability, right? 'Cause you've got to plan your life and I think we've heard this theme increasingly, I think, do I see myself fundamentally as a student who has other kinds of things or am I whatever who happens to be taking classes? Even as a full-time student, I think increasingly what Carmen Chan reversed to his post-traditional learners that includes what you've called us like modern digital 21st century learners, you know? Anything from this chapter that you wanna hit on that lines up with that that stood out to you? - Well, I mean, if we kind of go back to this concept of relational marketing, she says things like decisions aimed at creating value for customers. I think that's really interesting because it kind of implies that this is not happening by chance or by accident, it's intentional. And how many times have you and I talked about on this podcast, intentional course design, especially as we were differentiating it from emergency remote instruction of the pandemic, this is consistent with that. Design and organization of processes, communication, technology and people in support of the generation of value for the client. It's very business-centric sort of language that she's using there, which just fine with me, I'm actually very comfortable with that, but I know a lot of academics are not. So I think it's kind of spicy that she's framed in this way. - Yeah, I was thinking of that. The student as customer metaphor does not work for everybody. - Yeah. - But I don't know, please suspend your, have some willing suspension of your disbelief for a moment. And because I think there's something too, this, I was looking a little bit in, beyond what Dr. Neriya wrote and looking into relational marketing a little bit more, or sometimes you see relationship marketing. And the common thread I found across a bunch of sources is really about trust. And I thought, that is so human-centric, right? Forget like somebody's trying to sell me something bit, right? And I think why Dr. Neriya honed in on this concept and this chapter is relational as in people, as in connection, and as in, if you pay attention to my needs, I'm more likely to trust you, you have shown yourself to be trustworthy, relational marketing broadly, is like brands that you trust and come back to, there's something that's gonna pull you back, right? That you're loyal because it's not just transactional, there's something substantive there. And oh my goodness, don't we need more of that in our educational work? - Yeah. So do you wanna maybe turn to some recommendations that she had in her chapter? - Yeah, I mean, I think they build on those phrases that you used. I don't know that I'd call these rocket science, but nevertheless they're articulated and Dr. Neriya makes a good case here. For instance, she says, "The curricular design of the programs offered "at online modalities should not be an adaptation "of the programs for face-to-face on-side education. "They must be built based on the characteristics "of the students who access these, "what she calls study options, these modalities." Yeah. Student centric. - Well, I mean, again, we've talked about, let's just look at synchronous online instruction. - That's an example of, well, I lecture, I can just do that online without any recognition of the fact that the students who are taking your class actually work during the time when you wanna give that online lecture. - Yeah, but it's online. Well, it doesn't matter. They're scheduled, they got a shift schedule, they can't take it. We've talked about the fact that it adds geographic flexibility for the student but eliminates temporal flexibility for the student. So they're just as, it's almost as inaccessible as it would be if they had to drive to campus. So that's, I think, a very concrete example that's not even designed based. That's just kind of modality based, but I think it's similar. - Yeah, no, I think that's right. Another one, the design of the instruction must be characterized by including relevant, up-to-date, engaging content, as well as challenging active learning activities related to the current situation in which the students live and considering the limited time available to them. - Yeah. There's a lot. - Yeah. Well, related to the current situation in which the students live. Isn't that the, isn't that a concept called teach naked where it's you're being very transparent about how this is relevant to the students, this thing that we're learning. Here's why you need to know algebra, right? 'Cause the example is always, I'll never use this again. Well, here's why you will. And here's some examples of that or whatever. So, I mean, to me, that's the thing that stands out in that recommendation is more to it than that. But that's the one that kind of got a spotlight on it for me that the fact that it needs to be relevant related to the student's current situation. I think that's really important. Otherwise, why should they care? - More on the, I mean, I guess you could argue that all of these are faculty and instructional designer kinds of implications, but specifically calling out the faculty, Dr. Narea says, teachers who participate in online modalities must develop the relevant skills that these study modalities require, both in the design of courses and in their teaching, as well as in the use of educational technologies that enhance their work. - Yeah. - Doesn't just happen. - Yeah, absolutely. And you don't wanna be that professor that the students are all like, he can't even, is he not a used email. - Like understand the technologies that are at your disposal so that you can most effectively leverage them to help students learn. - Yeah. - Yeah. - It seems basic, but I'm sure all of us, anybody listening to this can think of an example of a faculty member that they know or maybe have worked with who, [BLANK_AUDIO] struggles with the technology. And some of it is just because I didn't want to learn it. But I like the broader skills, right? I mean, the course design and the teaching skills, it's a message we've addressed spoken to many, many, many, many times through the years on this podcast, just the importance of faculty preparation for success in online course design and teaching and blended course design and teaching, and really, well, any course design and teaching, just being equipped, as she says. You want to tackle this last one? Sure. Martin, the effective connection must be intentional affective within a connection, must be intentional planned, consistent, and demonstrated genuine interest in the student, generating an environment that contributes to developing a sense of belonging to a community that shares common interests and goals. What does that expression go that they won't care about what you know until they know they care about you, something like that? Yeah, I've heard it. They don't care what you know until they know that you care. That's it. Yeah. Yeah, I think this one may be my favorite, right? Because it talks about affect and genuine interest, is that human-centered thing and that phrase, a sense of belonging. You know, that belongingness is really so key to student success and well-being broadly. And how much more so in our technology-mediated contexts, we're missing some of the variables. So we've got to humanize them all the more. Yeah, very important. So I have a provocative kind of question based on all of this. How much do we think AI will be able to help actually facilitate some of this? When you think about embedding good instructional design into courses, I can see a role for AI in accomplishing that. Yeah, I don't disagree with that. As we've said many times, we need to let the AI do what the AI does well. And we need to let the humans do it. The humans do well and not get the two confused, though. Right? I think Dr. Neri elsewhere in her chapter speaks about, for instance, personalization. And so I think we've spoken before. You've talked before about how AI can help personalize learning and tutoring and practice. That, I think, makes a lot of sense. But not abdicating, not humans like, OK, well, good. The AI can do that. I'm going to sit over here and do something else. Do the human part. That part still-- how do we do that? Well, certainly that last one we talked about, that affective one, where knowing that your professor cares about you and your success, you're not going to get that from AI. Not authentically, anyway. No, no. Yeah, and I mean, that's a real-- I think it's a temptation, right? Like true story. I have heard indirectly of-- I have a friend. Yes. It wasn't me. But somebody told me about somebody else's thing that they were told that, you know, this person had a reputation as a commogen and didn't always come across well in email and then started adopting a practice of running their emails through one of the generative AI tools with a prompt to make it a little warmer and friendlier. And actually said that having done that for a while, people responded much more positively to that. Wow. Well, you know, good for him, if it's a him, I assume. For recognizing that and doing something about it. I guess. But that one challenge just be a little bit. I chuckle every time I think about it. But on the one hand, AI supports this human interaction thing. On the other hand, you're like, huh? Well, I would bet though that this person maybe needs the AI less now that he has seen-- yeah, let's hope that he's seen the results of that prompt changing what he's written to maybe he would reach a point where he wouldn't need it anymore. And he'd be self-aware enough to just write him the way he should. Like it's almost like just taking a class and learning how to do something better. If you use it in that way, but yeah, if you're just using it as a crutch to pretend to be something you're not, maybe it gets gray. Yeah. I've really been-- I got two books on sale recently that I'm really-- I swear, true confession. I feel like I don't successfully read a book unless I get a group of people to read it with me. And we talk about it. But two of them-- it was interesting. They were both on sale. But they're both sort of a kind. One is more about it. The individual level had something like developing skill at really seeing the other person and really being seen. So this diatic human connection thing, like, OK, that's important. And this other one was about human gatherings. How to really gather people in a meaningful way. And I thought, that has got such broad applicability but including in our educational context. But all the more now, I think we need to really give some reflective thought to that human connection, whatever that is. And then let AI in to bolster where it can be. Like I saw on, I think, LinkedIn recently, someone to kind of back to your question, suggesting that maybe in structural design would either be obsolete, the role of structural designers or radically changed as a result of artificial intelligence. And I'm like, well, I certainly hope not the first part. Radically changed, perhaps. Yeah, right. That would have been my guess. I mean, certainly changed. But instruction design isn't the only profession being radically changed by AI. They're in good company. Well, yeah, but it's, I think it's the relationship, right? Like at least in the higher ed context of structural design, the relationship between an instructional designer and a client faculty member, that has power. It's not that, you know, the structural designer, let me cookie cutter stamp out some core subjectives or module objectives or feedback on assessment strategies. There's more to it than that. AI may be very efficient at doing those kinds of tasks, but there's more to the human connection, I think, in that diatic relationship. Yeah. All right, well, I see that the clock winds down to the bottom of the hour. You want to try and put a bow on our plane and land it? Yes. I will come in for a landing blindfolded, backwards, and in the dark. All right. You might want to double up on your insurance. Please fasten your seatbelt. That's right. Put up your tray tables. That's right. And kiss something goodbye. Well, so we might say, by way of summary, while student marketing and enrollment gets a lot of attention in online circles, so much of our quality assurance efforts in online education are manifested in positive student impact, such as retention. Keeping our students, as you noted, Tom, is even more important than attracting them. How's that? Yeah, totally agree, amen. Well, thank you for the suggestion for this chapter from the Sage Handbook, which you edited, co-edited. Oh, edited? Yeah. And so it's a great resource. If folks have not checked it out, I highly recommend that they do. It's huge. There's a lot in there. So it's a wealth of information for anybody working in this space. All right. Until next time, for Topcast, I'm Tom. I'm Kelvin. See ya.