Reinforcing and facilitating learning communities is a strategy that has been used to decrease attrition rates in traditional campus-based programs, and it has been hypothesized that applying principles of learning communides in distance education programs could have similar positive outcomes. To facilitate the development and maintenance of regional learning communities within the Mild/Moderate Distance Degree and Licensure Program at Utah State University, highly successful graduates of the program are employed as mentors within each broadcast locality to engineer regional opportunides for studying and socializadon. Program evaluadon respondents indicate that mentoring experiences were very helpful as they progressed through the courses and pracdca. Moreover, graduadon rates increased from 53% to 75% since the inception of this approach.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.