Barriers

Ensuring maximum student retention and course completion may be one of your biggest concerns when teaching online. Due to your students now studying at home, there are several different factors which may hinder their learning:

• Distractions
  The lack of differentiation from study and leisure time that comes from studying on campus may result in your students engaging less. This may be due to them not having a designated study space, distractions from other family members or other responsibilities. It may be hard for your students to focus at home without the drive that comes directly from their tutors!
• Technology 
  Your students may not have access to the same technology at home that they do on campus. Having to learn from their mobile phones or iPads can cause them to struggle with loading the content, therefore hindering their learning.
• Wellbeing
  Having to transition from on campus to online learning, as well as the constant influx of breaking news, can be stressful and can impact on your  student’s wellbeing. This can have a knock-on effect on their engagement with the course.

How can I ensure student retention and course completion?

Student retention and course completion is strongly linked with student support and high levels of student satisfaction.

Try to keep in contact with your students as much as possible to aim to keep the learning experience as personal as it would be on-campus. Host weekly catch up sessions, whether these be one-to-one or as a whole class group. This can help to keep a sense of community within the  course. For tips on hosting one-to-one sessions and maintaining office hours, try this blog post: https://blogs.tees.ac.uk/lteonline/2020/03/27/virtual-office-hours/

It is important to encourage your students to speak to you if they are struggling to keep up with the online learning, so that you can offer them a suitable solution. The following blog can help you to understand how to support your student’s emotional wellbeing whilst learning online: https://blogs.tees.ac.uk/lteonline/2020/03/23/emotional-well-being-did-you-know/

Share tips with your students about working from home. Some ideas on how to prepare your students for online learning can be found here: https://blogs.tees.ac.uk/lteonline/2020/03/25/preparing-students-for-online-learning/

Try to incorporate some online group working into your content, to help give the students a sense of working together. Problem based learning does not have to stop whilst your students are out of the classroom. Tips on how to design online group working can be found here: https://blogs.tees.ac.uk/lteonline/2020/04/03/designing-problem-based-learning/

Ask your students for feedback on how they think the content could be improved for online delivery. Try to apply these changes if practical to do so, to give your students a sense of influence on how they are learning. Remember, you are all new to the experience, so any shared knowledge can be useful!

If you require any assistance with this, please contact elearning@tees.ac.uk