Deakin strives to cut the number of online students dropping out
KEEPING online students engaged remains one of Deakin University’s biggest challenges as it strives to cut the number of students dropping out.
Deakin University has a dropout rate of 14.66 per cent. This mid-tier result is far higher than the top performer the University of Melbourne, where only 3.92 per cent of students dropped out in 2015, but far better than Australia’s worst performer — the University of Tasmania — where 33 per cent, or more than one in five, of students dropped out.
The data, published in the Federal Government’s Improving retention, completion and success in higher education report, has led to recommenda- tions for each university to develop student retention strategies.
Deakin’s deputy vice chancellor of education Beverley Oliver said the university needed to better understand why students were dropping out and whether they were transferring to different universities.
“We are towards the top of the pack,” Professor Oliver Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal.
Trump tweeted yesterday: “Great to be in Singapore, excitement in the air!”
Trump and Kim arrived in Singapore on Sunday, both staying at luxurious and heavilyguarded hotels, with Trump at the Shangri-La Hotel and Kim at the St Regis Hotel.
Trump and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong met over lunch yesterday. Kim and Lee met the day before.
“The entire world is watching the historic summit between (North Korea) and the United States of America,” Kim told Lee through an interpreter.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director, spent the morning huddled with top aides preparing for the sum- said. “When people who leave us don’t tell us (that is a concern). We need to wrap ourselves around a student’s mindset and are most interested in finding out if a student leaves us because of something we have done.”
Prof Oliver said Deakin had already developed a targeted student-retention strategy aimed at its three core student groups — bachelor students, mature-aged students cloud students.
While Prof Oliver could not say which degrees had the highest dropout rates, she said retaining online students remained the university’s biggest challenge.
“It is clear that some of the students (that) are hardest to make sticky, to keep, are cloud students,” Prof Oliver said.
“One in four students are and fully online and they are largely working and caring professionals. When life gets tough and a child gets ill they disengage from the online unit — and they’re dropping out.”
Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the report’s recommendations focused on providing better guidance to school leavers and mature aged students before university enrolment.