Reimagining the "First-Year Experience" for Online, Adult Learners

For many students, particularly adult learners, entering online higher education for the first time can be overwhelming. At the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC), we on the academic affairs and student affairs staff tackled this challenge through a new first-year experience course designed to increase online student engagement and foster meaningful connections between students and faculty. An initial evaluation of the course showed that it significantly improved first-year students' likelihood of reenrolling at UMGC in the next term. Most importantly, we found that students who take the course are significantly more confident in their ability to complete their degrees, find resources, and overcome hurdles. The course also helps students feel more like they are part of the UMGC community. This blog post describes the journey UMGC took in developing the first-year experience course, the challenges we encountered, and the promising early results.

The Challenge of Online Student Engagement in the First Year

A wealth of evidence suggests that student course engagement in the first year is critical for ongoing college success.¹ The Association of American Colleges and Universities designates first-year experience courses as high-impact practices, meaning that educational research shows these courses can increase student retention and student engagement rates.² First-year experience courses have long been popular in many traditional brick-and-mortar institutions, but fostering similar levels of academic and social integration in online environments is uniquely challenging, as the sense of community that develops in many face-to-face courses can be difficult to cultivate online.³

Research shows that instructors who can foster a sense of community in an online classroom are essential for online student engagement. Students in online courses who feel comfortable and familiar with the instructor and their classmates are more willing to share information and are less likely to feel isolated in an asynchronous online environment.⁴ In fact, instructor-student interactions have been shown to have a greater impact on online student engagement than students' interactions with their peers⁵ because effective instructors reduce the "transactional distance" of online courses by engaging in open communication, providing holistic and frequent feedback, posting messages and updates, responding to students, participating in discussions, and generally helping students get to know one another as "real people."⁶ In short, online students "want to know that someone 'on the other end' is paying attention."⁷

PACE 111: Rethinking the First-Year Experience for the Online Learner

Those of us on the academic and student affairs staff at UMGC shared a growing concern that the university could feel like a faceless bureaucracy for new students. We worried that a new student could be easily overwhelmed and underinformed about various aspects of the UMGC experience, including the resources available at the university and the expectations and demands of being an engaged online learner. Because UMGC is a large institution and offers a substantial number of online courses across a variety of timelines and start dates, new students may not feel like they are part of an intimate cohort or learning community. Particularly in high-enrollment general-education courses, students may find it difficult to forge connections with their classmates and instructors. To address these concerns, in fall 2019, we launched a required new first-year experience course, Program & Career Exploration (PACE) 111.

When designing the course, we prioritized several concepts that are particularly relevant for adult learners in online courses. First, we wanted to encourage and cultivate students' intrinsic motivations for pursuing a college degree. To that end, the curriculum is infused with practices and activities to promote a "growth mindset,"⁸ which can help students prepare for and persist through the challenges they may encounter on their college journey.

Second, although fundamental aspects of the course were shared across all sections, we sought to create more "cohort-like" communities within our large population of first-year students based on shared academic and professional interests. Students enroll in different sections based on "meta-majors," including business, communication and humanities, health and sciences, public safety, and technology. In addition, because UMGC serves a large population of military-affiliated students, these students can choose to enroll in a multidisciplinary section that includes all academic programs as well as resources specific to the military-affiliated community. Within each meta-major, PACE 111 focuses on the personal and professional opportunities and possibilities related to students' chosen major or course of study. For example, one assignment asks students to conduct informational interviews with a professional in their desired career field and summarize their findings from that conversation.

Because we knew that the success of the course would hinge on the student-instructor relationship, faculty are selected to teach PACE based not only on their subject matter expertise but also on their high-touch engagement and mentoring skills. To cultivate that relationship, every faculty member creates a video to welcome students to the course, and students are asked to schedule at least two one-on-one, synchronous virtual meetings with the instructor, even though the course itself is delivered asynchronously. We deliberately keep sections small—twenty students on average—to make this task more manageable for faculty. Recognizing that this in-depth model of online student engagement may be unfamiliar to some faculty, we developed a targeted professional development course for all faculty who would be teaching PACE 111.

Results

To evaluate the overall success of this initiative, we collected overall course success and reenrollment data and feedback from a variety of sources, including, student post-course surveys, course evaluations, and faculty surveys. The results of this initial evaluation have been overwhelmingly positive.

Student Post-Course Surveys

We asked PACE 111 students to provide more detailed feedback on the course via a post-course survey, which was separate from the course evaluation that students also were asked to complete. The post-course survey asked questions aimed at assessing students' academic preparedness, confidence, and growth mindset, and gauging their sense of community and knowledge of university resources. An identical survey administered to non-PACE students in their first term at UMGC was used as a control. Six hundred and thirty-one PACE students completed the survey, and 159 non-PACE students participated in the control group.

The survey results showed that PACE students fared better in every category, and the difference between PACE and non-PACE responses was statistically significant for every question. Compared to non-PACE students, PACE students were significantly more likely to report confidence in the following areas:

• Feeling confident they will be able to complete the work needed to graduate
• Feeling prepared for future courses at UMGC
• Knowing where to find resources for support
• Knowing what they want to accomplish during their time at UMGC
• Setting goals that they are working toward
• Feeling like they are a part of the UMGC community
• Believing that their abilities can be improved through hard work and a commitment to learning (growth mindset)

Course Success and Reenrollment

When we compared PACE 111 outcomes to the outcomes of several other high-enrollment courses that students typically take in their first year, we found a statistically significant difference in completion rates (finishing the course with a C or better): students who were enrolled in PACE 111 had higher completion rates than students who were enrolled in other first-year courses.

Although it is too soon to tell if PACE 111 makes an impact on year-to-year student retention, we found that PACE 111 students were statistically more likely to reenroll in a subsequent term than similar students who did not take the course. In fact, PACE students were sixteen percentage points more likely to reenroll.

Student Course Evaluations

Overall student satisfaction with the course was high, particularly in regard to measures of student engagement and instructor responsiveness. Compared to students in other first-year courses, PACE students were more likely to contact their instructor, feel like their instructor helped them understand the course content, and report that their instructor provided them with useful feedback that helped them improve.

Students' open-ended feedback also suggested that their experience was overwhelmingly positive. When students were asked to discuss what parts of the course they found to be the most interesting, the most common responses included getting to know more resources at UMGC, getting the opportunity to think more deeply about their goals and an academic plan that would help them reach those goals, interacting with their fellow students and faculty members through the discussion board, and having one-on-one meetings with their instructors. However, students also let us know which aspects of the course were less popular. For example, some overseas students noted that the one-on-one meetings with instructors were difficult to schedule.

Faculty Feedback

We conducted a survey of PACE 111 faculty to better understand faculty's satisfaction with the training and preparation they received prior to teaching PACE 111, and to get feedback on the course itself and recommendations for future iterations. Overall, faculty were satisfied with the training they received. Some faculty cited uncertainty around the technology used for scheduling one-on-one meetings with students. Faculty were also generally enthusiastic about the course itself, with many reporting that the course was well-designed and that they enjoyed it and found it beneficial.

What We Learned

We are continuing to make changes to the course for future terms. We learned the following key lessons from student and faculty feedback:

• It is possible to implement a high-quality, high-impact first-year experience course in an online, asynchronous context.
• Synchronous, one-on-one interactions between faculty and students strengthened the relationship between students and UMGC and made students feel supported.
• Working through their degree plans and exploring their potential career paths (particularly via the informational interviews) helped students gain clarity about whether they were in the correct degree program.
• Extensive faculty training should be provided to ensure faculty are comfortable and proficient with any new software used in the course (in our case, this included software for scheduling meetings with students and software for making phone calls to students).

Although our initial results are promising, it is still too early to tell if the course will move the needle on measures such as future course success and retention rates. Nonetheless, we believe that a first-year experience course is just as important—if not more so—for online adult learners as it is for traditional students. We hope first-year experience courses will become more widespread among online institutions seeking to provide an engaging and supportive academic experience.

Notes

1. Vincent Tinto, "Linking Learning and Leaving: Exploring the Role of the College Classroom in Student Departure," in Reworking the Student Departure Puzzle, ed. John M. Braxton, 1st ed, Vanderbilt Issues in Higher Education (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000). ↩
2. George D. Kuh, "High-Impact Educational Practices: A Brief Overview" (excerpt), Association of American Colleges and Universities, June 24, 2014. ↩
3. William A. Sadera, James Robertson, Liyan Song, and M. Nichelle Midon, "The Role of Community in Online Learning Success," MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 5, no. 2 (2009): 277–284. ↩
4. Thomas Dyer, Jacob Aroz, and Elizabeth Larson, "Proximity in the Online Classroom: Engagement, Relationships, and Personalization," Journal of Instructional Research 7, no. 1 (2018): 108–118. ↩
5. Florence Martin and Doris U. Bolliger, "Engagement Matters: Student Perceptions on the Importance of Engagement Strategies in the Online Learning Environment," Online Learning 22, no. 1 (2018): 205–222; Tracey Muir et al., "Chronicling Engagement: Students' Experience of Online Learning over Time," Distance Education, 40, no. 2 (2019): 262–277, 1–16; Krystle Phirangee, Carrie Demmans Epp, and Jim Hewitt, "Exploring the Relationship between Facilitation Methods, Students' Sense of Community, and Their Online Behaviors," Online Learning 20, no. 2 (2016): 134–154. ↩
6. Doris U. Bolliger and Colleen Halupa, "Online Student Perceptions of Engagement, Transactional Distance, and Outcomes," Distance Education 39, no. 3 (2018): 299–316; Marcia D Dixson, "Creating Effective Student Engagement in Online Courses: What Do Students Find Engaging?" Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 10, no. 2 (2012): 1–13; Dyer, Aroz, and Larson, "Proximity in the Online Classroom." ↩
7. Martin and Bolliger, "Engagement Matters," 218. ↩
8. Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008). ↩

---

Laura Harris is the Applied Research Manager at University of Maryland Global Campus.

Martina Hansen is the Vice President of Student Affairs at University of Maryland Global Campus.

Beth Mulherrin is the Assistant Vice President for Retention Services at University of Maryland Global Campus.

Darragh McNally is Assistant Vice President of Innovation, Research, and Evaluation at University of Maryland Global Campus.