Student retention in distance education: are we failing our students?
Abstract
This paper brings together some data on student retention in distance education in the form of graduation rates at a sample of distance institutions. The paper suggests that there is a ‘distance education deficit’ with many distance institutions having less than one-quarter of the graduation rates of conventional institutions. It looks in some detail at the data for one well-known institution – the UK Open University – and surveys some of the reasons why such a deficit should occur and asks what the effects are on students, institutions and society as a whole. The paper suggests that one reason for the deficit is the ‘category error’ of confusing teaching with learning, and that institutions have focused too much on the provision of teaching materials, especially online, and too little on motivating students to learn. It maintains that there is accumulating evidence for the essentiality of proactive contact for overcoming dropout and the importance of making that contact motivational. The paper claims that such an approach is financially viable and can make surpluses for the institutions concerned if carefully designed. Finally, whilst briefly surveying some of the new developments in distance education in the form of Massive Online Open Courses, learning analytics, and the use of smartphones, this paper suggests more speculatively that rather than resources or organisation, the main barriers to increasing student success in distance education are institutional attitudes to student retention.
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Dropout rates in online and distance learning are high compared to traditional face-to-face learning.
“as dropout rates are high compared to the rates in traditional face-to-face learning (Glass, 2014;Simpson 2013;Vogel et al. 2018).”
From Towards a motivational design? Connecting gamification user types and online learning activities (2020) · cites this paper as Simpson 2013
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- Authors
- Simpson, O.
- Affiliations
- University of London (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Simpson, Ormond
- ORCID
- Simpson, Ormond
- Venue
- Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2013-06
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 105-119
- ISSN
- 0268-0513 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-9958
- OpenAlex
- W2079302356
- Cited by
- 181
- References
- 19
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 23 · 2021: 21 · 2020: 26 · 2019: 22 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 7 · 2015: 10 · 2014: 6 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 38.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Open Learning The Journal of Open Distance and e-Learning (publishedVersion)
- Open Research Online - ORO (The Open University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Education › Online and Blended Learning
- Social Sciences › Demography › Evasion and Academic Success Factors
- Social Sciences › Education › Higher Education Research Studies
- Keywords
- student retention, distance education, graduation rates, dropout, Open University, teaching-learning relationship, student motivation, online teaching materials, massive open online courses, learning analytics, smartphones in education, institutional attitudes, financial feasibility
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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