During topic 4 we noticed that it seems to be a general truth that students loose motivation along an online course. This may vary from course to course, and student retention could be high if a course is well designed, but it seems difficult to reach 100% student retention. In our group (group 2), we discussed various techniques to increase student retention, from course fees to active facilitators, and from early exams to ensuring that IT Tools work properly. However, when thinking about remedies to the decrease in student motivation, I was interested by a possible difference of approach to apply in the situation where students take distance with the course. There were basically two options to deal with this situation: (1) to ensure “happy” learning, be available as a facilitator, adapt the tasks to a great extent to the evolution of the course to ascertain an appropriate level of difficulty that neither discourages nor makes it too easy. (2) to include early exams to get rid of the least motivated students, to keep pace to ensure that the learning objectives are met, and generally to accept that students drop off. These two approaches could be described as a soft approach, and a hard approach. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon related to online learning, but it may be exacerbated by the flexibility and the lack of face-to-face pressure that traditional teaching implies. Interestingly the five-stage model and generally the literature we read insisted much more on the soft solution than on the hard one. In our discussions we also concluded that the soft dimension was key for the success of an online course. However, our discussions tended to point to the fact that we might need some sticks, on the top of carrots, in order to make it work and guarantee sufficient quality. A concrete example of “hard” measure could be to have a test early on in the course. In my opinion the person responsible for a course needs to consider how to strike the right balance between these two dimensions. It is most likely impossible to rely solely on one approach. How to strike the right balance may depend on several aspects, such as: what is essentially to be achieved through the course, whether or not students will need to pass certain requirements to eventually obtain a grade, as well as if they need to pay for the course. What is interesting is that when considering these three aspects, they do not speak for relying on the hard approach: if students pay for the course and need to pass certain requirements to obtain a certificate, there is probably only a low need for hard measures, because the tuition fee and the perspective of the exam will by themselves create an incentive. In free courses open to the public, facilitators are exposed to a real risk of students dropping off. Here, hard measures may be countereffective to ensure student retention, because students will not feel impressed by the risk of losing something. Therefore, it appears that hard measures are mostly relevant to ease the task of the facilitators and to keep a sufficient level of quality during the course, rather than to increase student retention.

Please let me know your thoughts on the above!