Student Interactions, Connectedness, And Retention In An Online Mba Program: An Exploratory Study

Applying an interactive learning approach provided by an academic coach in a graduate-level accounting course

“…Previous studies of distant learners including online MBA students demonstrate that student interactions with faculty, peers and teaching assistants can increase their online learning engagement, improve their learning outcomes, raise their satisfaction of course and instructor and ultimately contribute to their success in online courses, retention and degree completion (e.g. Bocchi et al, 2004;Bryant et al, 2005;Chang et al, 2011;Conner, 2019;Duncan et al, 2012;Strang, 2011;Ward et al, 2010;Zhong, 2018). Distant education studies have consistently shown that all types of interaction (learner-content, learner-instructor and learner-learner) are highly and positively correlated to both student achievement and student satisfaction (Bryant et al, 2005;Roblyer and Wiencke, 2003).…”

“…Student engagement, social interactions, sense of community and satisfaction are found to be important positive factors that influence online MBA students' retention (e.g. Boston et al, 2009;Conner, 2019;Liu et al, 2007b;Sailors et al, 2019). Previous online education studies suggest that the use of an academic coach or a teaching assistant can significantly increase student engagement (Gatlin and Alexander, 2010), enhance interactive learning (Bourelle et al, 2015;Broussard and White-Jefferson, 2018), improve learning outcomes (Rice-Bailey and Baker, 2017) and ultimately contribute to their competition of an online course (Fricker, 2013), their satisfaction of the course (Chang et al, 2011) and favorable faculty evaluations (Cipher et al, 2018).…”