It was hard to complain about the beautiful sunshine at the Instructional technology Council’s (ITC) annual conference in St Petersburg, Florida. The weather was perfect with high’s in the mid-70’s! Rachel Garcia, Ryan Crim and I attended the Feb 18 to Feb 22 conference. I was fortunate enough to be selected to present (but darn that Jason Myers who was supposed to present with me) a topic that I’ve worked on, “Bringing Distance Education Home: Exploring Place-Based, Experiential Learning Online”.
The conference had many sessions that were both informative for beginning online educators and seasoned ones, alike. There were several that interested me in terms of increasing retention of online students.
Some of the retention strategies involved changes at a policy level. One of the interesting revelations was that time of registration played a key role in student success, showing that students that registered for an online class after the first day of class were much less likely to achieve success in the class. This is something I’ve observed in my online classes at NWIC. If I allow a student to register after the first week, they are not very likely to finish the course.
At an instructional level, I gleaned some important tips on organization of the material and aids to encourage student participation. It seems one cannot go to a conference like this without coming away with a bag full of fun and effective Web 2.0 strategies. And I now have a new bunch of them to experiment with.
If anyone wants to brainstorm any of the things I learned, just contact me; I’d be happy to share!