Practices for student success: From face-to-face to at-scale and back

Abstract

U.S. higher education is experiencing a time of shifting landscapes, of new technologies, and of unfamiliar competitors. These and other factors, including decreasing public support for colleges and universities, mean that student success is increasingly paramount as a strategic goal for postsecondary institutions. While institutional-level activities such as increased funding for and emphasis on student advising and predictive analytics are crucial, they are insufficient for postsecondary institutions to realize broad and consistent student success. Instead, institutions can look to practices at the curriculum and course level to further student success. This article examines those learning design and teaching practices that constitute the overlap between a) higher education research and trends and b) the lessons learned from at-scale learning experiments. Postsecondary research has shown the effectiveness of practices supported by longitudinal data (high-impact practices), represent a confluence of effective learning design and teaching practices (high-impact teaching practices), and focus attention on lowering the costs of education, thereby making access to postsecondary education at least somewhat more equitable (open-educational resources). An analysis of at-scale learning experiments at the University of Colorado allows the layering of relevant and timely examples of specific MOOC design practices on top of the higher-education research and trends framework, illustrating the ways these two strands of student-success practices mutually reinforce one another.