It's all about Student retention

This post will concentrate on the benefits that peer mentoring bring to education establishment, having looking at the topic “what is a peer mentor?”  in a previous post  it was to understand the benefits that a peer mentoring scheme brings to any form of education establishment and specifically those offering online and distance learning programmes.

One of the first benefits I came across appeared in an  article written by Janet Truluck, an Academic Professional and Coordinator of an Online Master’s programme of Adult Education from the University of Georgia, USA. It is all about  STUDENT RETENTION.   She focused on the establishment of a Mentoring plan to improve retention in online graduate programmes. This is a theme that I had not even considered. Peer mentoring may resolve student retention.  What I was interested to hear was that retention issues were much greater in this format than in traditional campus based course.   I believe there are two challenges that programme leaders face:

• Maintaining contact with students
• Helping students overcome the feeling of isolation

This must be a challenge for most programme leaders, counteracted with the inclusion of VOH (Virtual Office Hours) and providing students pastoral support through a PDT (Personal Development Tutor). The question that needs to be asked is, is this enough to keep student churn down?   I remember when I first started the MSc degree  I am correctly reading the cohort was huge, although this number dwindled and there was really only a core group of students over with the first month of the trimester. Could we have saved a small percent of the drop outs by having a peer mentoring scheme?  So what are some of the reasons for student churn on online and distance learning programmes?

Online students face more distractions from work and family responsibilities which may account for a higher attrition rate than is seen in regular face to face classrooms. Some believe that distance education courses require significantly more time and effort on the part of faculty (Thompson, 2002)  Thinking about this even more,  a programme leader or programme teams  biggest challenges  are ensuring  that their course is  cognitively stimulating and that there is solid supportive environment in the virtual classroom (Wiesenberg 1999).  So distance education does bring with it a whole new set of issues to both instructors and learners with retention being at the forefront of concerns. A buddy scheme, mentoring programme is in many cases not on their list of priorities. It is challenges such as maintaining programme accreditation, creating stimulating modules to increase the appeal of their programme and ensuring that they are update to date on current trends that maybe push the topic of peer mentoring to one side.

For those of you interested in reading more Google the following.

Thompson, M. (2002, October). Faculty satisfaction. Sloan-C View: Perspectives in Quality Online Education, 1, 6-7.