The Pivotal Role of Faculty in Online Student Engagement and Retention

Abstract

The premise of this chapter is that higher education online faculty have a pivotal role in student retention; faculty participation is key to student engagement and engaged students tend to complete courses in which they are enrolled. However, frequently faculty members are unaware of the impact their active participation and visibility has on student engagement and retention. In addition, online courses are an important source of revenue for many institutions of higher education and attrition results in loss of revenue. Given that faculty have a pivotal role in retention, institutions of higher education can benefit fiscally from guiding and supporting online faculty in strategies of student engagement and retention. Faculty support is needed during the process of change inherent in faculty adapting to teaching online, through providing on-going faculty professional development and by creating a teaching culture inclusive of informal scholarly investigations related to instructional effectiveness in online course delivery.

Asynchronous Video and the Development of Instructor Social Presence and Student Engagement

“…Essential to the future of online learning is the ability of faculty and institutions to overcome retention issues, which continue to limit the success of students in the online environment (Allen & Seaman, 2014;Xu & Jaggars, 2014). Estes (2016) claimed that increasing student engagement directly contributed to a decline in student attrition rates, and faculty presence was a critical component to student engagement. Faculty presence included developing and sustaining an organized course infrastructure with clear expectations and communication, establishing a sense of classroom and institutional community, and facilitating self-directed learning (Estes, 2016).…”

“…Estes (2016) claimed that increasing student engagement directly contributed to a decline in student attrition rates, and faculty presence was a critical component to student engagement. Faculty presence included developing and sustaining an organized course infrastructure with clear expectations and communication, establishing a sense of classroom and institutional community, and facilitating self-directed learning (Estes, 2016). The concepts of faculty presence described by Estes (2016) closely resemble the concept of instructor social presence, which was defined by Richardson et al (2015) as the overlap between the COI principles of teaching presence and social presence.…”

“…Faculty presence included developing and sustaining an organized course infrastructure with clear expectations and communication, establishing a sense of classroom and institutional community, and facilitating self-directed learning (Estes, 2016). The concepts of faculty presence described by Estes (2016) closely resemble the concept of instructor social presence, which was defined by Richardson et al (2015) as the overlap between the COI principles of teaching presence and social presence. This overlap constitutes the "live" parts of the course where the instructor facilitates discourse and delivers content, while also demonstrating that they are a real person through open communication and affective expression (Richardson et al, 2015).…”

“…In most online learning literature the role of the instructor in the online class has been minimized secondary to the establishment of social interactions between peers (Lowenthal, 2016). More recently, the focus of education research has shifted back to the importance of online instructors, and their role in facilitating the learning process, engaging students, and increasing student satisfaction (Estes, 2016;Ma et al, 2015). Phirangee et al (2016) suggested that the instructor-student relationship may be paramount to the development of a sense of community in online learning, and the biggest influence on student participation.…”

“…Online learning creates an atmosphere which allows for greater access to education by reducing the barriers of time and place, but it also changes the ability of peers and instructors to support each other through face-to-face interactions (O 'Shea, Stone, & Delahunty, 2015). Text-based communication and the typically asynchronous nature of online learning can create feelings of disconnect or a transactional distance between students and instructors (Byrd, 2016;Estes, 2016). This transactional distance has been shown to reduce student engagement, which is a major predictor of student retention, and an area of concern for higher education institutions that offer online courses (Byrd, 2016;Estes, 2016).…”