Sometimes institutions try to launch a program without making sure the faculty are supportive of the program. The faculty may not feel ready, they haven't taught online before and the course development structure is not designed so they can be successful. Another problem is that institutions tend to think that if they offer the program, the students will come, which is traditionally the way that we have delivered higher education on campus. That is not the case with the distance learning audience. They're distributed all over the country and you've got to find a way to find them and attract them to your program. There are institutions that we have worked with who have started doing some marketing on their own, for instance they are promoting on some online portals with fairly good results, but they have limited or no prospect tracking system and nobody is managing those prospective student inquiries. No one is responding to them. We find that it's very important to have enrollment advisors available who can respond in person to inquiries within 24 hours and can continue to follow up and advise students about what this program is like, via phone and email.
We also find that institutions structure programs in ways that are not retention-based. Directed independent study, for example, is not very successful for an adult distance learning professional audience. Online students need more structure than that. Institutions have a tendency to think that the convenience factor demands that prospective students be able to have as much time as they need or want to complete courses and they provide very little structure by offering the program in an independent-study, self-paced format. We find that this approach has a retention rate of only about 25 percent. The kind of model we recommend, which is a facilitated cohort model, the retention rate is much higher, at 90-95 percent. For example, returning students in the clinical laboratory science program that we talked about previously, those students who have completed at least one term in the program, the retention rate runs about 98 percent. For first term students, the retention rate is about 94 percent.
IMS Global: Is structure one of the primary factors that drives successful retention?
GP: There are a lot of things we think impact retention. One of them is how the program is structured. Another thing we've discovered is that working professionals only want to study one course at a time. What some institutions will do is to try and structure the program in a way that they end up having to deliver every course every term and they offer two or three courses at a time for students. They expect those students, in order to complete the program on time, will enroll in two or three courses simultaneously. What we find is that working professionals will not do that. If you ask them to take two or three courses simultaneously, most of them will enroll in one. But if you take those two courses and offer them back to back in the same term, a working professional will think, "I can do one more thing besides work and take care of my family. And so, I'll take one course. But eight weeks later, here's another course and I'm prepared to give my full attention to that next course."
