Student Retention in online Courses

Running Head: STUDENT RETENTION

Student Retention in Online Courses

A climbing number of requests for refund of tuition prepayments have been reported, as a reflection of increasing dropout rate among students. In the meantime of expanding aggressively in the market, efforts should also be put into enhancing retention rate of enrolled students. The following literature reviews try to identify the potential reasons of the trend of quitting school and evaluate existing strategies to cope with it.

In contrast to the quitting trend faced by company, strong growth has been maintained within entire English language training market in China with more than 400 million English learners. According to Technavio's analysts (2015), “the English language training market in China to will grow at a CAGR of 18.75% over the period 2014-2019” (p. 1). In this case, the drop of retention rate can hardly result from a decreasing demand in industry and problems within the organization must be identified and addressed. Judging from an analysis of student feedback, a lack of motivation when studying alone and problems relating to technical issue are likely to be the main catalytic driving new online learner out of school.

One of the most distinctive features of online education is that knowledge is transferred within a virtual classroom where traditional classmates are separated by space or time. In the study of asynchronous distance education, Moiler (1998) described the need for learning communities by retrospectively analyzing abundant existing researches. It was stated that a community could support individual student by functioning as a platform of social reinforcement and information exchange. However, in the distance-learning environment, physical separation was found to have prevented learners from obtaining the sense of recognition from each other and complementary knowledge through collaboration. Instructions about how to create community were also demonstrated. This study, along with many others (Gay and Lentini, 1995; Ahern, T. C., Peck, K., & Laycock, M., 1992), help track down the reasons of losing students by pointing out peer interaction as an essential element in learning process.

Although lacking practical experiment and actual data, the article provided convincing arguments supported by plenty examples and mass credible researches. While in the context of asynchronous web-based courses, it still shares something in common with synchronous courses that typically provided by 51Talk. As in China, students who have grown up studying in a traditional classroom may find it uncomfortable studying in the one-to-one environment, figuring out how to build a community is likely to enhance retention rate. By studying how a mentoring system functions, 51Talk may find a way to provide more customized and satisfying services.

In addition to peer interaction, relative research had also been conducted regarding how technology issues impact retention of web-based learning (O'Brien & Renner, 2002). In the article, discomfort with technology was stated as a challenge in online learning. The transition into new delivery system could distract students from learning content and even create unnecessary frustration in dealing with technical problems. Technical training manual and informatics course were proposed to help equip learners with adequate computer skills to accommodate to online study.

Although distraction would not be a problem in synchronous English tutoring, complaints did keep arising with respect to how poor Internet connection had been interfering with class efficiency among a large portion of students. So studying how to cope with technology issues will be helpful in assisting student in technical emergency such as Internet disconnection and significantly alleviating the sense of disappointment and helpless when such thing happens.

The analysis above is all about potential reasons for dissatisfactory experience in the learning process. On the other hand, evidences showed that learners who are satisfied with their courses could also quit school due to personal reasons, according to the study of the attrition among graduate business students in online education (Carroll, Ng & Birch, 2013). The authors held in-depth interviews with 18 students who are categorized as active, delayed or exited students. “A clear theme which emerged from both the interviews and a considerable body of student retention literature was that a lack of study time due to external factors, such as work and family commitments, was a major obstacle to students’ ongoing participation in higher education” (Carroll, Ng & Birch, 2013, p. 5).