Innovative Orientation leads to Improved Success in Online Courses

Abstract

A team of instructional designers, educators, and the School of Liberal Arts (SLA) academic program coordinator from a nonprofit online college, collaborated on producing short voice-over videos with interactive elements that address the most common technology frustrations of beginning students. These videos were inserted into the "Start Here" page of the pilot study courses. Courses were selected that had a higher than average withdrawal rate and that also tended to have a broad grade distribution for students who completed the course. The videos with voice-over covered basic navigation, such as posting to a discussion board, submitting an assignment to a drop box, reviewing a grading rubric in the grade book, and opening a graded copy of an assignment to view instructor feedback. The orientation element contained interactive tools that allowed students to check their learning of the skills covered in the videos. The orientation videos were available throughout the 8 weeks of the course. After viewing the videos, the students were asked to complete a short survey, which included both quantitative and qualitative feedback. The responses to the survey were extremely positive, ranging from 84.48 to 90.67 on a 100-point scale. The team also examined course withdrawal rates and the grade distribution before and after the insertion of the videos. The data for almost all of the pilot study courses showed a drop in withdrawals after the use of the video orientation element. Several courses showed a significant drop in withdrawals. The examination of the pre-and postintervention grade distribution showed an improvement in grades for almost all of the pilot courses. This improvement in grade distribution was statistically significant in some courses.

Writing a Literature Review Narrative

“…Fricker reported that 19 of the 20 students completed the course with a C or better and credited the support provided by the teaching assistant. Taylor et al (2015) investigated the influence of a video course orientation tutorial on online course completion rates. Their results showed significant improvement in grades and reduction in withdrawals for only some of the courses.…”

The Role of Orientation Programs to Prepare Students for Online Learning: A Case Study From an Executive MPH Program

“…While online students agree that an orientation prior to the start of a course or program is important (Bozarth et al, 2004; Cho & Heron, 2015; Nash, 2005) and that student satisfaction and experience with an online orientation experience positively influence a student’s academic self-efficacy (Abdous, 2019; Brewer & Yucedag-Ozcan, 2013; Kanuka & Jugdev, 2006), it is also critical to remember that online students are diverse and, therefore, orientation programs need to be tailored for the target group of students (Wozniak et al, 2007). Participation in an orientation session has been shown to be associated with readiness to learn (Liu, 2019), successful completion of online courses (Ali & Leeds, 2009; Bawa, 2016; Russo-Gleicher, 2014; Taylor et al, 2015), and higher course grades (Bellantuono, 2020; Taylor et al, 2015; Wojciechowski & Palmer, 2005).…”

The Effect of a Multifactor Orientation on Student Performance: Organizational Skills, Goal setting, Orientation to Classroom, and Academic Support

“…However, many students-particularly those in their first term-may not understand their own academic strengths and weaknesses, and whether or how they should access available supports. Faculty can help students develop this understanding by serving as a mentor, helping them define specific steps toward achieving academic goals, sharing effective time-management strategies, and helping them develop an awareness of and willingness to utilize different avenues of academic support (Coon & Walker, 2013;Flynn, 2016;Kot, 2014;Taylor et al, 2015;Zie & Huang, 2014).…”

“…Crosling, Heagney, and Thomas (2009) found that an orientation class at the start of a student's college experience increased engagement by helping them grasp the most important elements of online preparedness. Taylor et al (2015) developed an orientation for first-year students with a combination of multimedia resources. Hendricks and Bailey (2014) asserted that online students must be technologically prepared to overcome the variety of multimedia content in online classes.…”