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Online persistence in community college distance education: Perceptions of major stakeholders

Posted on:2008-01-22Degree:Ph.DType:Dissertation
University:Capella UniversityCandidate:Stanford-Bowers, Denise EFull Text:PDF
GTID:1447390005477865Subject:Education
Abstract/Summary:
Online learning is growing in popularity at all levels of education. This option in itself is a major advancement in allowing students greater flexibility in building a course schedule that caters to their lifestyles. This is beneficial especially to those adult students who are trying to successfully integrate educational pursuits into already busy lives full with work and family responsibilities. Although online learning appears attractive to many adult learners hoping to pursue higher education, it is not necessarily a panacea for every challenge confronting the adult learner. Despite its astronomical growth in the past decade, distance education programs see a number of casualties. A large number of students register for online courses with no concept of what the experience will entail. Many of them either withdraw from the course formally or informally through lack of participation. This attrition could be the result of a number of factors from lack of ability and/or motivation on the students' part to ineffectiveness of the instructor and/or the course in meeting the students' needs and expectations. Online learning presents its own unique challenges for not only the learners but the faculty and administrators as well. Those who are responsible for making decisions regarding, designing, facilitating, and even learning in these cyber-environments must stretch themselves to think beyond the limitations of the traditional classroom. This study examines the perceptions of online persistence factors as seen by the three major stakeholders in community college distance education programs: administrators, faculty, and students. The purpose of the study was to determine which factors are most important among the three groups and where those perceptions converge since lack of convergence could be a factor resulting in high attrition rates of some online courses.
Keywords/Search Tags:Online, Education, Perceptions, Major
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