BOOSTING STUDENT LIFE SATISFACTION AND ENGAGEMENT TO IMPROVE ONLINE STUDENT RETENTION (2017)

In 2015, the Electronics Engineering degree programme at Aarhus University School of Engineering in<br/>Herning decided to offer an online learning option concurrently with providing traditional classroom<br/>instruction. Following this initiative, the student intake increased significantly, primarily because the<br/>programme appealed to a completely new target audience. With the online opportunity, it was decided<br/>to implement the ‘flipped classroom’ approach into both online and on-campus teaching, meaning that<br/>online students were able to join the classroom teaching synchronously and asynchronously.<br/>Moreover, Insights Discovery Personal Profiles were introduced, and based on their profiles, the<br/>students were divided into online/on-campus teams with all colour energies represented in each team<br/>(blue, red, green and yellow). In addition, the students’ practical skills were taken into account, making<br/>sure that at least one person in the team had vocational training. To enable online students to<br/>communicate with each other and the lecturers, an e-learning platform via Adobe Connect was<br/>established. At semester start, the online students attended an introductory course, where they were<br/>introduced to the learning platform and could meet their fellow students. However, despite these<br/>initiatives, a high dropout rate of online students enrolled in the study programme in 2015 was<br/>observed.<br/>Personal conversations with the programme mentor have shown that one of the factors influencing the<br/>online students’ decisions to drop out is their full-time job; having a full-time job while studying full time<br/>is very time-consuming. Another reason for the student dropout is a feeling of disconnection with their<br/>fellow students and the campus environment. Consequently, various strategies to motivate and retain<br/>the students were implemented with the 2016 intake. Potential students were invited to a clarifying<br/>conversation, where it was specified how many hours a week the student is expected to study. Here,<br/>the issue of the work-family balance was also addressed. This ‘screening’ has certainly made it clear<br/>to the students what is expected of them. In addition, we have seen a decrease in students with fulltime<br/>jobs who, thus, are able to join the teaching synchronously, engaging them much more directly.<br/>This, combined with a new strategy of forming mixed teams of online and on-campus students, has<br/>boosted the student life satisfaction significantly and improved the online students’ interaction with oncampus<br/>students. Today, online students take much more responsibility, as they also want the oncampus<br/>students to be successful. Conversely, on-campus students now feel more responsible in that<br/>they must ensure that the online students do not feel isolated, e.g. by providing them with information<br/>and electronic devices that they need to complete a project at home or via the mobile kit ‘Lab-in-abox’.<br/><br/>Since September 2015, 11 out of 14 online students have dropped out the study programme, i.e. a<br/>dropout rate of 79%. Compared to this, the dropout-rate of the online students enrolled in September<br/>2016 with the implemented new strategy, has been reduced to 43% (10 out of 23).