Is online learning for everyone? The answer is unequivocally “NO.” Certainly there are benefits to online learning for the majority of adult learners as related to overcoming the traditional barriers of time, location, and career/family constraints. However, these benefits do not ensure that an online learner will be successful. Although the demographics and learning styles of an adult learner do contribute to patterns of success, I recently read an interesting study on demographics and personality types of distance learners that indicated the following: Read the rest of this entry »
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ReadyMinds.com (www.readyminds.com) is a global leader in customized, outsourced Distance Career Counseling Services and related training. I have personally spoken with a several wholly online schools who are utilizing ReadyMinds in some capacity. My point here is not to promote one company over another but to indicate that there is a growing trend for online schools to begin focusing on those all important “performance indicators”, one of which is career counseling and job placement.
In my last post, I briefly mentioned that online schools should also consider the ”less common” student services as part of their student experience repertoire. To expand on that just a bit, for example, I know of very few online institutions that offer career counseling and job placement services. Compare that to traditional brick and mortar schools and it is evident that there is a huge disparity.
In most online schools, the attempt to promote these services falls on deaf ears or takes a very low priority. Is it that key stakeholders of those schools are not interested in the student’s long-term well being, retention, and program enhancement? With the coming shift to performance indicators as key metrics for evaluating online schools, administrators of those schools need to wake up and begin piloting some of these programs. I recently have spoken with several schools that have implemented virtual career centers and are meeting with good success.
Do you know what your online school is doing?
In recent years, online education’s selling propositions have included convenience and flexibility. Although I am convinced that those propositions will remain part of the equation, I see an underlying current that will in the near future bring to the surface ‘performance indicators” as key metrics in evaluating online institutions. Those indicators will include retention and graduation rates, learning outcomes, course section sizes etc.
An important building block to these performance indicators is Student Services. In today’s virtual space, those services include academic advising, orientations, resource and library services, academic advising, and technical support. These certainly are the most common Student Services but as this market becomes more competitive, these foundational services need to be consistently enhanced and improved. It is also critical that additional, less common services be introduced that enhance that all important student experience.
If you are a prospective online student, these services should be an integral part of what the school you are interested in is providing. If you are currently a student, you need to take full advantage of any Student Services that your school offers, and even make suggestions for new ones. If you curently work at an institution that has online offerings, you need to champion how to enhance what I call that all important “student experience.”
More to come …