Dropouts and gamification

Here, far too late, my reflections for topic 4 come. How to retain students on online courses. We all had the experience that the rate of dropouts is much higher in online courses than in campus courses. The reasons are. The most common is probably that the students also work and they overestimate the time that they can devote to their studies (or underestimate the time that they need to devote). Its found that consoling that all students grapple with a constant lack of time. In order to further illustrate what is needed for keeping students aboard, we produced word clouds with the help of the mentimeter. The question was: How do we prevent dropouts from online or blended learning courses. We produced one cloud for our group and we asked the big community to contribute to another. Interestingly, they were partly different.

I think the five-step model covers many aspects of Biggs’ Constructive alignment framework and the COI framework. The course in which I participate is a living proof of how these frameworks can be translated into practice. It is brilliant that we in our online course experience our own learning at the same time as we learn how to educate students online. I believe these frameworks that we have used in our handbook will be very useful for me when I will make an online course.

References

Biggs, J. 1996. Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32(3), 347-364.

Koivisto, J. & Hamari, J. (2014), “Demographic differences in perceived benefits from gamification”, Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 35 No. 179-88.