The anticipation was building up. I was going to be leading Topic 4 but still had a few challenges to overcome. How was I going to host this meeting when Educor doesn’t have Zoom licence? How was I going to access features that were required for the meeting? So, I just threw caution to the wind created a free account and hoped for the best. This was also an experience on how to overcome these digital learning challenges.

The first meeting went fairly well. It’s always interesting to learn the views of my fellow community members. Blended learning comes with many challenges and questions. How much of the course should be online? What kind of support will the student and staff require? How do we prevent students for dropping out from a blended course? Why are students dropping out?

Students drop out of courses for various reasons. It can be due to the lack academic background and not enough support received from their institute as well as the lecturer/facilitator. There are a number of students online learning experience as well as the necessary study skills and digital literacy. Added to this are factors that concern the course itself.

The design of the course is instrumental in retaining students. The ICEBERG  7 key principles provide a clear description of how an online course should be designed to avoid course dropouts. ICEBERG acronym concisely stands for:

• Integrated. This clearly presents the activities and material of learning outcomes which allows the student sees a purpose for every section. Students need this visible to them from the beginning, so they will not receive any surprises during the course that will make them feel overwhelmed and drop out.
• Collaborative. Creating a supportive learning community between students and teachers.
• Engaging. Course material that is relevant and meaningful to the students.
• Balanced. The course must at structures at a steady pace and manageable workload.
• Economical. Teachers must avoid overloading students with too much information. They must stick to information that is relevant to the course.
• Reflective. Students must be encouraged to reflect on their learning process through frequent formative assessment activities.
• Gradual The course must be structured at a gradual process moving from simple to increasingly complex tasks as the course progresses.

 

These 7 principles provide a neat framework when designing a strictly online or blended learning course.

ONL has indeed helping me improve my skills in creation of online courses.

 

References

Van Ameijde, J., Weller, M., Cross, S. (2018) Learning Design for Student Retention. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice Vol 6 No 2.

Simpson, O. (2013). Student retention in distance education: are we failing our students?  https://doi.org/10.1080/02680513.2013.847363