Front Line Strategies for Improving Student Success in Online Education

Abstract

Faculty teaching both onsite and online courses have unique insights into how each modality can be implemented to be most effective for student learning. In their online classes where students might be more likely to struggle, these faculty are continually looking for methods and strategies to help their students learn the material more effectively. A survey was conducted with 174 faculty that teach both onsite and online to gather ideas on why online courses often have lower success than onsite courses. While overall results of this survey are provided in “Faculty Perspectives on Narrowing the Success Gap Between Online and Onsite Learning” (Cherif et al., 2019), this study leverages the free responses provided in the survey where faculty provided details on their specific strategies to help their online students. These strategies touched on nearly every aspect of online instruction, including course design, resources for students, student characteristics, teaching strategies, student engagement, and assessments. By sharing these strategies, other faculty can consider what might be impactful for their online classes and students, study the impact and continue to improve online education worldwide.