The knock on online courses has often been the high drop out rate, but some courses are beginning to adopt changes that should help alleviate that problem.
This is good news for those who want to enroll in online business courses. Universities and colleges now recognize that this is the path they must take to remain viable, but that improvements to the online education experience are needed in some cases.
For students, it’s a solution to a long-time dilemma. Those with a bachelor’s degree have, in the past, faced dropping out of the workforce to return to school or perhaps having to move closer to the college or both. Online classes offer flexibility to deal with those issues.
Still, online courses are relatively new. Many business schools continue to make changes to improve the student experience.
For example, in a column on Businessweek, Stanford University professor Chuck Eesley wrote that he teaches a course in technology entrepreneurship that is offered through the university’s NovoEd program. Eesley said that all the information beforehand indicated he would be fighting an uphill battle for student retention.
A report from the Massive Open Online Classes run by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – called EdX – bring this point home. According to the report, 95% of the students enrolled in EdX courses in 2012 and 2013 did not finish the course.
Andrew Ho, a Harvard Graduate School associate professor, told Businessweek that part of the reason that students dropped out might be due to the fact that some are not signing up to earn a certificate, merely to check out the information and perhaps learn enough about a subject to satisfy their curiosity.
Still, Stanford’s Eesley has a much better rate – 45% to 65% of his students finish the course. “That’s a resounding success,” Eesley wrote for Businessweek.
Part of the success can be attributed to making the online classes a collobrative effort, a method already used by many schools. He has students organize teams, get mentors and have those mentors give feedback on the team projects.
Eesley also wrote about the benefits such online class collaborations have for studnts in the long run. They form teams that span the globe, working with people in other cultures and time zones. Such soft skills – primarily through electronic communication – is “becoming crucial” in today’s de-centralized workplace, Eesley wrote.
“Executives educated in this new collaborative online environment will most certainly have an advantage, not only in subject matter expertise but also in the team skills that are becoming critically important in the global business landscape,” Eesley wrote.
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