Assessing Online Learning: What One University Learned about Student Success, Persistence, and Satisfaction

Peer Review, Fall 2006 by Moskal, Patsy, Dziuban, Charles, Upchurch, Randall, Hartman, Joel, Truman, Barbara

With more than 73 percent of adults in the United States using the Internet (Pew Internet and American Life Project 2006), universities are turning to Web-based instruction to better serve the needs of their students. As an endeavor by educators to maximize learning opportunities for the Net generation-students with lifestyles that involve frequent use of personal, mobile, and digital technologies (Oblinger and Oblinger 2005)-online lesson delivery also responds to higher education's role in the emerging world economy (Friedman 2005). Current statistics show that more than 2.3 million students took an online course in fall 2004 and that this educational mode is growing more than 18 percent a year (Alien and Seaman 2005). These data underscore the important role that online resources play in the lives of undergraduate students, 78 percent of whom indicate they used the Internet for homework prior to entering college and 80 percent of whom have a computer by their freshman year (Educause Center for Applied Research 2003).

As a result of these developments, the past decade has seen online teaching and learning evolve from an experimental intervention to a legitimate component of contemporary higher education. In the present postsecondary environment, it is difficult to find a college or university that does not offer some form of distance or distributed learning. Today's college students have grown up expecting everything to be available online and, indeed, universities have responded to these expectations by offering a variety of online options for them. Many are developing fully online programs designed to meet both student demand and strategic institutional goals. The question is no longer whether online education is as good as face-to-face instruction, but rather how to prepare and support faculty in the online environment and ensure that students achieve important learning outcomes whether they study in online or face-to-face settings or both.

The abundance of Internet resources creates such easy access to information that the majority of students now rely on the World Wide Web as their primary portal to knowledge, opinion, social networking, and entertainment (Jones 2002). Social networks create a sense of community among students when learning is a collaborative and distributed process. News packages on the Web link to corresponding blogs so that news acquisition becomes interactive and cooperative. Podcasting enables a truly mobile learning environment, and sources such as Google and Wikipedia seem to make virtually anything available online. Classes are not constrained physically or temporally, proving that continuous engagement for students is not only a possibility but, in many instances, a functional reality. Many faculty members energize and redeline themselves through online teaching, and students have access to learning resources that were not available a decade ago. In fact, it seems reasonable to conclude that very few genuine face-to-face classes, as we have historically defined them, persist in higher education because even if an instructor does not use online technologies, his or her students most certainly do.

As the online environment expands, however, it presents formidable challenges to higher education. Universities must confront the demand for new pedagogies, enhanced support for both faculty and students, organizational redefinition, authentic and contextual assessment techniques, and new policies and practices. Unfortunately, these transitions have not necessarily been seamless. Some question whether online learning adds value for student learning outcomes, claiming it leads to lower success rates and higher rates of withdrawal (Noble 2001).

Adaptation to Growth: A Case Study of Online Learning Milestones

The University of Central Florida (UCF) is a major metropolitan research university whose stated mission is to "offer high-quality undergraduate and graduate education . . . and contribute to the global community." To accomplish this mission, the university has implemented a combination of online learning strategies to accommodate diverse regional educational needs, with considerable resources allocated to Web-based degree programs, certificates, and course offerings.

A significant factor in the success of UCFs program is that it resonates with the university's strategic plan and, as such, is supported by UCF's policy initiatives. In a key speech offered to the academic community. University of Central Florida President John C. Hitt noted that UCF has achieved success at the undergraduate and graduate levels bt using Web-based technology to facilitate delivery of curricular content to both on-campns and off-campus target markets, augmenting the instructional program with a combination of fully online, partially online, and Web-enhanced face-to-face courses (Educause Center for Applied Research 2003). This transformation to a distributed learning environment is achieved through Online@UCF, a component of the university's Center for Distributed Learning (online.ucf.edu/cdl).