Abstract
This paper investigated success rates and possible predictors of success among students at The University of the West Indies Open Campus. Archival data were mined from admissions and academic records of students from the 2008 intake to explore retention and completion rates, and for students enrolled in two online undergraduate courses in Semester 1 of the 2012/2013 academic year. The two courses had consistently high failure rates. Descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression were used to analyse the data. The results indicate that among the 2008 cohort, the retention rate was high (>75%) and the completion rate compared favourably with other similar institutions. Significant predictors of programme completion included sex and location of the students as well as cumulative GPA at the end of the first year of study. Predictors of success for individual courses included the location of the students and engagement with course resources.
Highlights
For many decades, distance education has been provided and used as an alternative to faceto-face instruction, and many individuals who for whatever reasons could not access face-to-face instruction, have made use of this facility
Online learning is defined as “a structured learning activity that utilizes technology with intranet/internet-based tools and resources as the delivery method for instruction, research, assessment, and communication” (Michigan Department of Education, n.d., p. 1) and as “learning that takes place partially or entirely over the Internet” (Means, Toyama, Murphy, Bakia & Jones, 2010, p. 9). These definitions capture the notion that online learning is done via the Internet and the Michigan Department of Education (n.d.) indicates that there are different modes of delivery that fall under this term
The findings presented here are arranged under subheadings that reflect the issues that featured in the investigation: student success as measured by overall programme completion rate, retention rates, and predictors of successful completion of programmes
Summary
Distance education has been provided and used as an alternative to faceto-face instruction, and many individuals who for whatever reasons could not access face-to-face instruction, have made use of this facility. These definitions capture the notion that online learning is done via the Internet and the Michigan Department of Education (n.d.) indicates that there are different modes of delivery that fall under this term The only significant predictors in the model were location of the student (campus or non-campus country) and the number of times the student logged onto the course site
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