Showcase Track: Retention

Dr. Eva Fernández
Director, Center for Teaching and Learning, Queens College- CUNY and Associate Professor, Linguistics & Communication Disorders

This presentation provides a description and analysis of how technology was used to improve the retention of at-risk Hispanic students at a predominantly Black institution. In Fall 2010, the Education Department and the Association for Latino Studies Student Club (ALAS) participated in an ePortfolio pilot project focused on improving student engagement, fostering integrative learning, and encouraging personal development through reflective writing. Preliminary findings indicate that Hispanic students’ connectedness to the college increased after participation in this project.

A critical challenge surrounding commuter campuses is to provide essential resources that facilitate learning, and enable student success in courses with high failure rates for non-traditional students. Expanding Access to Supplemental Instruction through Online Tools will focus on sharing a collaboration framework between supplemental instruction staff, online instructional support staff, and course instructors to leverage existing synchronous/asynchronous communication tools and instructional technologies that extend access to accommodate students who would otherwise be unable to take advantage of additional instructional services and resources provided by the university.

Since 2003, authorities in Colombia have been implementing a series of policies and regulations which in turn, have modeled a competence-based educational system, as a teaching-learning methodology, as a formative horizon, or as the acknowledgement of students´ independent work to achieve the formative goals set by the academic program, assuming the academic -credit system as a total measurement of the academic work a student has to accomplish. Along the implementation process, initiated in 2005, the Colombian educational system showed (with variations among academic programs) an increased desertion rate, reaching as high as 50 % for last year students in areas such as Agronomy, Veterinary Medicine and Engineering, due to, among other socio-economical factors, the lack of assuming responsibility by the students in their learning process and the lack of independent work sceneries planned and designed by teachers. On the other hand, long before the guidelines were provided by the Education Ministry, Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia started the consolidation of a pedagogical tool named MICEA (interdisciplinary methodology focused on learning teams) which acknowledges not only its five components (Direct teaching, self-learning, team learning, tutoring and assessment) but also the involvement of Institutional values such as Freedom, Solidarity and Respect for diversity as collaborative learning catalysts, seen as part of the independent work students have to comply with, within the academic credits-system.
In spite of such advancements, non-presential sceneries were not available for students´ independent work, which make the principle of Flexibility, related to competence and credit-based system, not achievable, given that time, places and learning rithms are different among students, and cannot be set by teachers, therefore requiring interactive environments to facilitate teacher-student communication and collaborative instruction- learning proposed by MICEA. Such gap resulted in an increased course failure, which in turn resulted in student desertion and decreased retention.
Considering the latter, Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia initiated in 2008 the incorporation of Communication and Information Techniques, which aims to favor the interaction between teachers and students with flexibility and to facilitate achieving the goals of the academic program. Particularly, the project “Towards a competence-based education using autonomous learning environments” was proposed for the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Sciences, which resulted in an increased dynamic interaction between teachers and students, flexible schedules and academic tutoring strategies.

This study also confirms the importance of considering the evaluation of all the actors who take part in the implementation of a distance education program. All this will require educational institutions to redirect their efforts towards strategies that result in greater satisfaction among students and the use of administrative approaches that integrate and adapt existing structures to new modes of study. This will provide a greater increase in institutional success and therefore a higher rate of student retention.

The implementation of programs that evaluate online courses guarantees students’ satisfaction and quality in teaching, learning and institutional use. It also promotes positive perceptions of resources, recruitment and student retention in distance programs.