After colleges hastily moved online in response to the coronavirus, higher education leaders worried for low-income students and students of color. Research shows that underrepresented students experience performance gaps and lower retention rates in online courses under the best of circumstances, let alone in a global pandemic.
But remote education experts have highlighted a possible silver lining. Online education provides new ways to identify students at risk of dropping out and opportunities to offer targeted supports.
On campus, faculty can keep an eye out for early indicators that a student is struggling – a missed first assignment or a low grade on the first test – but online, professors can detect trouble even earlier and “it can be even more nuanced,” said Dr. Di Xu, associate professor of education at the University of California Irvine and co-director of its Online Learning Research Center.
“You don’t have to wait until the first quiz,” she added.
Using clickstream data, which monitors how users interact with a website, faculty can see how often students log in to their online class portals. If they’re seldom engaging with course materials, that’s already a “bad sign,” Xu said. And with online courses, faculty can track even more granular information than that, like when students opened an assignment and how long they spent on it.
Schools can also give students access to data about their own personal work habits – how long they typically spend on assignments or how often they’ve engaged with course materials – alongside guidance about what the optimal numbers might be for better time management.
“They can find out, ‘On average, what do my peers do?'” she said. “‘What are the learning patterns of people who typically get an A?'”
