Student engagement is recognized as a primary driver of academic persistence and completion. However, campus efforts to provide opportunities for engagement both inside and outside the classroom often fail because of changing student demographics. To foster engagement, campuses should borrow models already developed by their online programs and offer them to the entire campus community.
The purpose of this presentation is to share with the audience the alignment of current research on engagement and the best practices in the online and onsite education community. Recommendations will be offered based on a review of literature and experiences at Berkeley College.
In many colleges, a majority of students are working full-time while pursuing their academic degrees. These employed students – who schedule their courses around their work commitments – were seen in the past as “nontraditional.” Campus programming, which is critical for building student engagement, tends to be focused on the traditional student, who attends school full-time during the day and, perhaps, works part-time in the evening. Similarly, the classroom experience is confined to the four walls and time frame that defines an academic course. The homework done by students is independent, and is a relationship between the student and the material. Student-faculty and student-student engagement needs to wait for the next class session to occur.
Over time, student demographics have changed. However, the classroom and extracurricular programming of many campuses still targets the full-time day student. Not surprisingly, events outside the classroom are poorly attended and efforts to use them to build student engagement fail.
Colleges with the new “traditional” student – one who juggles a full-time job, family responsibilities, or both – should look to models of curricular engagement and extracurricular programming currently used for online students in order to properly serve their entire student population leading to increased retention and graduation goals.