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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
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.
Motivation is an important factor in and for all education levels. However, as learners in online distance education milieus are away from both teachers, other learners, and the learning environments physically, this concept becomes more important for online education. Motivating learners in distance education and keeping their motivation alive throughout the learning process is an issue that should be emphasized and taken care of for teachers and instructional designers. At this point, although there are many approaches, models, and theories regarding enhancing and sustaining motivation and engagement in the education processes, it is seen that there is not enough work and/or effective and efficient strategies that can be applied in online distance learning environments. Motivation, Volition, and Engagement in Online Distance Learning evaluates motivational obstacles in online distance education both theoretically and practically, identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the online education environments regarding motivation, and provides actionable motivational and volitional strategies for online educators. This book offers coverage of topics such as learning theories, motivation research, and synchronous online learning environments, making it a valuable resource for researchers, professionals, decision makers, institutions in all education levels, academicians, pre-service teachers, and most importantly, online educators from various disciplines and learners from all educational landscapes.
Supporting Students for Success in Online and Distance Learning, Third Edition, provides a comprehensive overview of student support both on and off campus. While online and distance learning are the world’s fastest growing areas of educational development, they have a fundamental weakness—their graduation rates, which can be lower than 20 percent. In this powerful new edition, Ormond Simpson builds on a rich history of research in distance and e-learning to show how retention rates can be improved through tested support methods, often at a net financial profit to the institutions involved. By comparing the evidence as well as the cost-effectiveness of various support tactics, this book describes how to promote student success and encourage skill-development from a number of different perspectives: definitions and purpose, theory and psychology, ethics, costs and benefits, activities, sources, media, proactive and reactive, assessment and feedback, staff development, writing support into course materials, research, quality assurance and institutional structures. This concise, practical guide is informal and jargon-free, yet its approach to evidence is rigorous, making it invaluable reading for all those interested in recruiting and teaching diverse students for successful online and distance learning.
This is an essential resource for anyone designing or facilitating online learning. It introduces an easy, practical model (R2D2: read, reflect, display, and do) that will show online educators how to deliver content in ways that benefit all types of learners (visual, auditory, observational, and kinesthetic) from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill levels. With a solid theoretical foundation and concrete guidance and examples, this book can be used as a handy reference, a professional guidebook, or a course text. The authors intend for it to help online instructors and instructional designers as well as those contemplating such positions design, develop, and deliver learner-centered online instruction. Empowering Online Learning has 25 unique activities for each phase of the R2D2 model as well as summary tables helping you pick and choose what to use whenever you need it. Each activity lists a description, skills addressed, advice, variations, cost, risk, and time index, and much more. This title is loaded with current information about emerging technologies (e.g., simulations, podcasts, wikis, blogs) and the Web 2.0. With a useful model, more than 100 online activities, the latest information on emerging technologies, hundreds of quickly accessible Web resources, and relevance to all types and ages of learners--Empowering Online Learning is a book whose time has come.
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.
At a time when more and more of what people learn both in formal courses and in everyday life is mediated by technology, Learning Online provides a much-needed guide to different forms and applications of online learning. This book describes how online learning is being used in both K-12 and higher education settings as well as in learning outside of school. Particular online learning technologies, such as MOOCs (massive open online courses), multi-player games, learning analytics, and adaptive online practice environments, are described in terms of design principles, implementation, and contexts of use. Learning Online synthesizes research findings on the effectiveness of different types of online learning, but a major message of the book is that student outcomes arise from the joint influence of implementation, context, and learner characteristics interacting with technology--not from technology alone. The book describes available research about how best to implement different forms of online learning for specific kinds of students, subject areas, and contexts. Building on available evidence regarding practices that make online and blended learning more effective in different contexts, Learning Online draws implications for institutional and state policies that would promote judicious uses of online learning and effective implementation models. This in-depth research work concludes with a call for an online learning implementation research agenda, combining education institutions and research partners in a collaborative effort to generate and share evidence on effective practices.