Online courses present both opportunities and challenges for students. Students often report feeling isolated and alone and many fail to complete their course. To foster more engagement and increase student success, we have implemented weekly, video-conferenced office hours and review sessions across all courses. Using technology that allows students to see and hear their peers and faculty member, our weekly online office hours and review sessions have garnered much attention from students, and the number of participants continues to grow. We will share our findings regarding the relationship between student participation in office hours and both student achievement and student completion for our online courses. We will also share some of the methods our faculty have used to promote their office hours and online review sessions to encourage student attendance.
At the University of New England, student enrollment in our online courses is rapidly increasing. With this increase, we strive to maintain rigorous courses that include opportunities for student interactions. Studies show student success is affected by the human connections that our students form while enrolled in our courses. Our video-conferenced office hours and review sessions give students a platform on which to connect, interact, discuss content, and ask questions of each other at least once per week.
In this presentation, we will review our efforts towards implementing video-conferenced office hours and the efforts towards achieving buy-in from all adjunct faculty across the Science Prerequisites for Health Professions program. While we use Blackboard as our LMS and use the discussion board feature across all courses, our adjunct faculty have been given some choice with choosing an online video-conferencing program that works best for their needs, while meeting the needs of our students. Currently, our faculty use such platforms as Blackboard Collaborate, Google Hangout, Zoom, Appear.in, and Skype, each with its own set of pros and cons.
We are in the process of implementing several strategies to determine if there is a clear relationship between attendance at the weekly online office hours and review sessions and student achievement scores and course completion. To this effort, we are collecting data regarding student attendance, student performance, course completion, and student satisfaction as students become more accustomed to having the opportunity to engage with each other and their instructor on a regular basis.
Anecdotally, after discussion board topics were added to these courses, some students reported that they were more engaged and felt more connected with their instructor and classmates. They also reported that they felt more instructor presence, while faculty reported that they felt more connected to students.
With the implementation of video-conferenced office hours and review sessions each week, our anecdotal feedback from students and faculty is that they feel even more connected now that they can see, as well as listen to, each other. We anticipate that we will have more positive feedback from students and faculty as we move forward.
Further, we anticipate that our data will show a relationship between student participation and connectedness via videoconferenced office hour and review sessions to their academic achievement level and likelihood for course completion.
This is a work in progress. During the presentation, we will share our findings as we collect them and are open to discussion and feedback from session participants.
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