The claim comes from Carl Lygo, vice-chancellor of the private BPP university, in a booklet, What Do I Get?, published by the Higher Education Policy Institute think-tank.

Professor Lygo, whose university specialises in business, says that – despite universities being able to charge up to ?9,000 per year in tuition fees – “students are unhappy and universities want even more money”.

“I am left asking: ‘Where has all this extra money gone?’,” he adds. “I fear the answer may be that it has gone to boost pension funds, research and vice-chancellors’ pay – anything but enhance the undergraduate student experience and the direct costs of undergraduate provision.”

His comments come after the findings of a report by Parliament’s spending watchdog, the Public Accounts Committee, were published. The report takes the Treasury to task for being slow in identifying and addressing “seemingly excessive pay awards” in the education sector.

University vice-chancellors and “superheads” have been given large pay increases with little oversight, MPs said in its annual examination of the Government’s accounts.

Some vice-chancellors earn more than ?400,000 per year. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, has expressed concern over the “substantial upward drift” of the salaries of some of the top management in universities.

In a letter to the Higher Education Funding Council, the  spending watchdog, he said: “We want to see leaders in the sector exercise much greater restraint as part of continuing to hold down increases in pay generally.”

Professor Lygo said that most universities are investing in infrastructure. Yet “only 11 per cent of students saw this as a priority”.

“One student told me that her course involves only six hours of classroom teaching per week,” he added.

“She told me ‘I just don’t think students are getting value for money’.”

However, Dr Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, has argued that UK vice-chancellors earn “significantly less” than their counterparts in the United States or Australia.

She said: “The salaries of vice-chancellors and other senior staff at our universities reflect their roles leading extremely complex, international organisations with annual turnovers of more than half a billion on average.”

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By: Rob Kelly in Online Education

Do certain personality traits increase students’ chances of success in the online learning environment? It’s an intriguing question that has not received much attention, an oversight that Ben Meredith, director of the Center for Distance Education at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, has sought to remedy.

“We hear all the time that online education is not for everybody. If it’s not for everybody, who is it really for?” asks Meredith. The answer to this question can help higher education institutions improve course design and, in turn, improve online learner success and retention.

The study

In 2009 Meredith surveyed 149 students at Olympic College, a two-year institution in Washington State, to explore the following research questions using the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II and a demographics detail survey:

Are certain online students more likely to succeed in the online format as a function of their personality factors?Are specific online students more likely to have a higher retention rate in online courses as a function of their personality factors?What is the demographic profile of a successful online student?What is the demographic profile of a retained online student?

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter asks a series of questions that classifies each respondent into one of the following categories:

Guardians speak about duty and responsibility, follow rules, respect the rights of others, and are the most predominant group within the U.S. (as well as the largest group identified in this study).Idealists speak about hope for others and imagine what is possible for others.Artisans are rule breakers. “They are somewhat self-centered and see rules through the spirit of the law, not necessarily the letter of the law,” Meredith says.Rationals are pragmatic and efficient and are the least common category in the U.S.

The courses in this study were largely what Meredith considers to be “low- and no-contact” courses. Artisans were the most successful (as measured by grades) in these courses, followed by a subset of the Rationals category (INFP—who are more introverted than extroverted and prefer intuition to sensing, thinking to feeling, and judgment to perception) and one of the temperaments within the Guardians category (ESTJ—who are more extroverted than introverted and prefer sensing to intuition, thinking to feeling, and judgment to perception).

Meredith says researchers have long speculated that introverts, due to their proclivity to think things through before responding, would be more likely to succeed in the online learning environment, as opposed to extroverts, who “like to think out loud.” However, this study found no statistically significant correlation between introversion or extroversion and online learner success.

As for retention, Idealists were more likely to be retained—enroll in more than one online course over a three-term period.

“I think the low- and no-contact courses play to the Artisans and Idealists,” Meredith says. “Idealists are going to build community. Artisans are going to take advantage of the lack of the instructor being present and interact as they need to.”

Compared to the general population, Rationals were disproportionately low in this study. “Rationals would need to have interaction with the authority figure—the teacher or expert. They see the purpose of community, but if there is no community, they’re not going to build it,” Meredith says.

The demographic questions were a side element of the research that validated the online learning demographic research of others and showed there are no demographic differences between the successful online learner and the retained online learner.

Implications

This study has several implications in terms of recruitment, advising, and course design.

“We see, at least in this study, that we’re being effective with the marketing,” Meredith says.

The demographic data in this study yield the following portrait of the typical online learner (which has been noted in other studies as well):

26 years old (or older)married (or in a committed long-term relationship)whitefemalehas one or more children of day-care agehas an annual household income of $52,000 or lessaccesses the course between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

“We know this student. She is trying to get ahead and for one reason or another was not able to finish college and is now coming back to do that. And the only way she has to do that is online. Maybe that is not the person who is going to be the most successful to bring through the door. Maybe we should approach other students,” Meredith says, suggesting that perhaps the market for online learning extends beyond those who enroll strictly due to scheduling issues.

Meredith says that advising techniques need to be modified to take learners’ personality traits into consideration. “I’ve seen too many advisors who look at online as a way for students to fit a class into their schedules that they couldn’t otherwise [fit in]. I don’t think that’s the most effective way of advising students.”

Instead of automatically advising students to take online courses, Meredith suggests having students use the Keirsey Temperament Sorter or a similar instrument before enrolling, to let them know how others with similar personality characteristics fared in the online learning environment. “It would take just a few minutes for them to go through a temperament sorter of one type or another. The results could be stored in their records so the algorithms are pulled up for advising. We already matriculate for so many other things, such as English and math capabilities. This would add one more tool to our toolbox.”

As for course design, Meredith says that institutions are moving away from the “electronic correspondence course” model as more instructional designers are working with instructors to design online courses.

Meredith recommends a constructivist approach to course design. “From my perspective, a good online course has community building [and] instructor presence and involves students on nearly a daily basis—at least five days a week. I think that’s what makes online learning the most powerful.”

Instructor individuality is also an important factor, and students should be advised to enroll in courses taught in ways that suit their temperaments, Meredith says, recommending that institutions create algorithms that match students with instructors who are most likely to help them succeed.

Meredith says this approach may lead to courses being populated by like-minded students (who may have different opinions, but who are similar in temperament), which can help students learn. “When you get like-minded people into a room, it lowers the affective filter, which makes the students more comfortable. And the greater the comfort level, the more opportunity we have to bring in new ideas.”

The downside to this approach is that the interactions in the course with like-minded classmates will be quite different from the interactions they will have outside the course. Meredith acknowledges this but argues that creating this artificial environment will increase students’ potential for success. “While it won’t be what students face in the real world, many students have only one shot at education. Wouldn’t we want to maximize that one shot so they can get the most out of the course even if we have to establish a somewhat artificial environment?”

Reprinted from Online Classroom, 12.4 (2012): 2,3. ? Magna Publications. All Rights Reserved.

Tags: online course retention, online student retention, online student success

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By: Anne Reed in Distance Learning Administration, Online Education

Institutions of higher education are increasingly using online courses and fully-online programs as tools to increase enrollment. There are many issues surrounding the subject of online education as an enrollment strategy. For instance, attrition rates are higher in online courses and online programs than in the face-to-face environment (Carr, 2000; Moody, 2004). It has been well-established that academic and social integration are key factors influencing retention, yet many institutions do not take a systematic approach to ensuring adequate integration opportunities for online students.

Faculty members, at the front-lines of the retention issue, can help to improve student success rates by providing a sense of community in the online classroom and making meaningful interaction and student engagement a priority. Functional units of student services should work collaboratively with faculty members to expand the breadth of support for online learners, with the conviction that retention is everyone’s issue, and fostering student success is everyone’s responsibility.

The following section provides a sample model in which three areas of student services work together to support online faculty members in identifying at-risk students and using analytics to detect potential risks and address issues so as to avoid attrition.

There is ample evidence that new-student orientation programs are a warranted retention strategy, especially when the program incorporates both academic and non-academic factors and acts as a socially inclusive and supportive environment (Colton et al., 1999; Tinto, 1993). An online orientation for students who are new to online learning can assist with issues that are specific to this group (ensuring online learning readiness, time management skills, accessing and utilizing necessary technologies, and becoming familiar with the online learning environment).

Orientation should go beyond the “soft skills” of technology-use and aim to integrate online students into the community of the institution by providing opportunities to interact with peers, faculty, and support staff such as advisors, as well as to become aware of the array of support services that are available to them. Synchronous events, discussion boards, and live chat sessions can easily be incorporated into an online orientation to provide students with multiple opportunities for interaction.

An online orientation is devised with the intent of transitioning students to a new environment. Orientation should provide students with the resources they need to be successful in that environment as well as information on how and where to get help if they need it. Many students, though, just might not be ready for college, or may not have the skills that are required to succeed in an online learning environment.

A diagnostic tool, when implemented during a new-student orientation, could potentially identify students who are at-risk of not succeeding. Then, an early-warning system can be set up by enrollment management to monitor these at-risk students, especially during their first year when students are most likely to drop-out. Today, most Learning Management Systems (LMS) have alert-system capabilities, or the ability to integrate with an external early-warning application. Technology is capable of tracking a student’s graded performance, late or miss?ing course work, and attendance within an online course, and other learning analytics, therefore allowing instructors or administrators to intervene appropri?ately and proactively so that the issue is addressed before problems arise that could possibly lead to drop-out or failure.

Technology-enabled alert systems have many benefits, including making intervention initiatives efficient to manage, and offering real-time information about student progress. If a student is falling behind or showing signs of failure in an online course, an academic advisor can be alerted so that he/she may intercede and provide immediate assistance to the student. Academic advisement can play a strong role in retention by serving as a facet of institutional support, and, in an online environment specifically, advisement may provide a “humanizing” element to the online experience.

Online students are faced with many unique challenges, including a lack of social community, which may lead to a sense of isolation. Therefore, a proactive advising policy is recommended for online students, one which is focused, direct, and of a high frequency, so that students feel a sense of support rather than isolation. An online academic advisor should find ways to connect with students, such as providing required scheduled meetings, optional synchronous video office hours, and frequent contacts (just to “check-in” or if an alert is triggered by the early-warning system).

The problem of retention in online education represents a significant challenge. As institutions continue to use online courses and programs as an enrollment strategy it becomes increasingly necessary for faculty and administrators to search for potential solutions to this retention problem. The solution lies in increased efforts to meet the needs of online learners by implementing a cohesive plan in which faculty members and student services work together to ensure the success of this growing population of students. An institution in which functional units combine efforts to meet the specific needs of learners is one which demonstrates a concern for the success of all students, regardless of the learning modality.

References
Carr, S. (2000). As distance education comes of age, the challenge is keeping the students. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 46(23), A39-A41.

Colton, G. M., Connor, U. J., Jr., Shultz, E. L., & Easter, L. M. (1999). Fighting attrition: One freshman year program that targets academic progress and retention for at-risk students. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, 1(2), 147-162.

Moody, J. (2004). Distance education: Why are the attrition rates so high? The Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 5(3), 205-210.

Tinto, V. (1993). Leaving college: Rethinking the cause and cures of student attrition. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Anne Reed is an instructional designer at the University of Buffalo, Office of Online Education, Graduate School of Education.

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