The exact moment you lose your students (and how to pull them back)

All great educators start with the intention to create the best experiences for our students. We spend hours thinking about, testing and evaluating learning activities. Taking care to be meaningful and consistent. Perhaps we manage to throw in a little bit of innovation and challenge.

Every time the eager learner logs on and turns up will be as earth shatteringly important to them as the time before and the time after. They will love our classes and want to know more. But in the back of our minds we know that at some point the students stop coming to our classes and their participation in online discussion boards become eerily quieter week by week, post by post.

You might be one of the lucky ones who still has designated synchronous classes over 10 weeks or more (this is increasingly less so) and if you do then you are really making sure you pull out all the tricks to keep the students turning up in those learning spaces every week. But we know, realistically, that once we get to the 4-week mark our student attendance will drop and not just that, but actual participation will decline as well. 

Over 5 courses in one program we tried a cast our net to try and find one that would work. In one course we used the Moodle lesson tool. This tool is excellent at gathering the learning analytics that tell us that students are in the resource, clicking even if they are not being active or engaged. In week one there was 89% of students accessing the lesson and by week 4 it was down to 78% until we get to week 8 and we are at 57%. In the second course we used another excellent digital tool called Articulate Rise. A tool designed to support students with a contemporary interface and interactive features. We started well with 92% participation in week 1 which dropped to 65% by week 4 and 46% by week 7. However, in our other 3 courses we used the Moodle books tool and we started with 100% in 2 courses and 97.5% in the other. By the end of the course content being presented all three courses were still registering in the 90% range for interaction. So what was the difference?

Same academics, same program, similar students, same LMS. We acknowledge that there are variables but our observations revealed that the 3 most successful courses were presenting the asynchronous content but added in a social element.  And linking explicitly to the assessment didn’t hurt. In fact it would be almost impossible for students to pass the courses without ‘engaging’ with at least 80% of the course materials.

To get the students to feel like they were contributing even though they weren’t seeing each other, we used VoiceThread. Positive comments like it “allowed [them] to speak to [their] tutor and peers, while also gave [them] a chance to receive verbal feedback on [their] knowledge and understanding” was not uncommon. It wasn’t all happy camping though as some struggled with the volume of participation saying that “some Voicethreads became too long and complex” and “inter-student interaction volume became too overwhelming”. We suspect that the use of Voicethread alone did not stop the week 4 cliff fall.

Unsurprisingly assessment is a highly motivating force for all students. Our courses which had continued participation all required the students to produce portfolios. This style of assignment creates a flexible experience for the student in which they get to chose what they show us but also that they have engaged with the content. One student made the link between the assessment and the learning in the course by saying that they “learnt a lot during this course and I attribute this to good assessment design”.

Knowing that there is more than likely going to be a week 4 ‘cliff’ can help us prepare for that point and hopefully plan a route that follows the cliffs edge rather than meeting the dead end. Initial learning design that provides a flow of content in terms of quality, relevance and quantity will support students to manage their load at the critical times in the semester. Making assessment a non-negotiable part of the process so that learners are motivated to participate in order to either get a good grade or engage in what you have decided is actually the most important learning outcomes, is fundamental. And actually thinking about how the online learning environment is going to feel can help, as one students stated “I really appreciate the thought put into the aesthetic of the online space I am learning in” which included knowing that they were going to have opportunities to interact with their peers either through text based forums or audio video spaces like voicethread.

Join the Discussion

Have you noticed similar engagement patterns in your own courses? When do you typically see the biggest drop-offs? Share your own data, observations, or strategies.