Centre for Distance Education lunchtime seminar - conducted by Ormond Simpson, CDE Visiting Fellow. 

This seminar shows that student support need not be a pure institutional cost in distance education. If properly designed and evaluated it can actually make a financial profit for the institution as well as enhance its reputation. Heath warning - this presentation contains some mathematics.... 

Presentation slides for this talk can be found here: www.cde.london.ac.uk. More information on Ormond's work can be found here: www.ormondsimpson.com.

Following the money - the cost benefits of student support in distance education

CDE seminar looking at writing course design for flexible learning, held at the University of London in June 2014.

Chair: Dr Clare Sansom, Senior Associate Lecturer, Birkbeck, CDE Fellow

Presentation 1: Ormond Simpson, Education Consultant, Visiting CDE Fellow

Designing distance courses for student retention. This presentation outlined how distance courses might be re-designed to improve student retention both in print and online.  It will look at some of the theories behind such re-design and the evidence for them.

Presentation 2: Gwyneth Hughes, Reader in Higher Education, Institute of Education, CDE Fellow

Gwyneth explored how students can be encouraged to engage with formative feedback and drew on findings from a JISC funded project Assessment Careers (www.ioe.ac.uk/assessmentcareers).

Slides and more details can be found at www.cde.london.ac.uk.

CDE seminar: Writing course materials and formative assessment for successful flexible learning

For the latest free CDE seminar we were very pleased to welcome Jon Bellum, Provost and Senior Vice-President at Colorado State University-Global Campus, to Senate House to talk about a case study for retention in online learning.  

Colorado State University-Global Campus is a 100% online public institution focused on providing adults with career-relevant bachelor’s and master’s degrees. A university wide retention and persistence program was designed to provide its non-traditional students with the support they needed throughout the student lifecycle. Since implementing this process improvement, CSU-Global has been able to maintain first-to-third term retention rates that exceed 80% and a four-year retention/graduation rate that exceeds 75%.

The presentation ran through the processes involved in implementing this programme and reviewed the outcomes. The slides and seminar is of interest to anyone involved in developing courses for online or flexible delivery – audio for the session can be found at www.cde.london.ac.uk.

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