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By August 2019, by way of institutional data analysis, the Online Learning Office will determine baseline course completion rates, by term and by year, for the following comparative student groups: fully online students vs. partially online students; minority online students vs. non minority online students; full-time online students vs. part-time online students; online students under the age of 22 vs. online students 22 and over.
By August 2020, by way of targeted academic and non-academic supports and structures, the online course completion rates for each comparison group will change by a statistically significant percentage, as evidence by institutional course completion analyses.
The Online Learning Specialist has been working with Institutional Research staff on further refining the Argos datablock available to the Online Learning staff. Variables identified in the POA goal are available in the report, but some issues have occurred with the reliability of the minority/ethnicity status variable. An additional variable indicating first generation has been added to the list.
Initial comparative analysis from the Fall 18 and Spring 19 course outcomes indicates 1) fully online students complete at a lower rate (on average) than students who blend F2F and online courses, and 2) little completion difference is found between PT and FT students. The Online Learning Specialist is working with IR to determine if these differences are significant, and if there are significant differences between the other comparative groups.
Continuing of the fall 19 semester, fully online students have starting receiving slightly different messages than students taking at least one GCC course at a physical location.
FALL 2020: The Online Learning Specialist has ensured that Online Learning’s Argos datablock includes all necessary information for this POA analysis. Requests to determine statistically significance between comparison groups has not yet occurred due to other college-wide analysis priorities with IR. We hope to be able to have some of these deeper analyses in the coming months. General differences between various groups’ course outcomes from the Fall 2019 will begin now, in preparation for the Fall 2020 outreach efforts.
JUNE 2020: The analyses between targeted student populations began in the fall 2019 term and through the beginning of the spring 2020 term. A few weeks after the Feb. update, the college responded to the COVID pandemic and further analyses within the OL and IR offices was suspended. The ability to utilize Argos data for these comparisons is in place for future use. OL staff has already spoken about more targeted outreach to select students taking online courses in the fall 2020 term.
Although this goal is being marked as complete, the ultimate outcome associated with this two-year POA goal was not fully met. Some progress was made and specific groups showing lower completion patterns from their partner group (the fully online students vs. those with some online and some on-site studies) received additional outreach and support. The COVID crisis will make it challenging to know if the efforts paid off in the spring 2020 term. Work on this goal will continue as staff availability and time allows in the future.