This session will examine how retention in an affordable, at-scale online degree program is affected by three categories of variables: the profile of students prior to entering the program, the decisions students make upon entering the program, and the results of students' initial term in the program.

Prior research has found that in affordable at-scale online degrees, more than half of students who enroll and subsequently drop-out do so very early in the program, before completing even two classes. As such, understanding what predicts early-program retention can have significant value to admissions decisions, preparation recommendations, and early-program curricular interventions. To explore the question of what predicts early-program retention, we draw from a dataset of 43,250 students across 311,407 individual class enrollments. We explore three categories of variables that may help predict students' likelihood to return for a second semester: the profile of students prior to entering the program, the decisions students make upon entering the program, and the results of students' initial term in the program. For some of these variables, we further examine whether the predictive power of the variable has altered over time, noting that the COVID-19 pandemic drove greater overall awareness of online education and thus may have dramatically altered some of these relationships. We find that there are statistically significant effects of most variables, including age, citizenship, country of residency, and early-program decisions, but most have small effect sizes; first-term performance, however, has a large impact on likelihood to persist to a second semester.

Alex Duncan

Senior Director of OMSCS at Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus

Alex Duncan is the Senior Director of the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program at Georgia Tech, as well as the co-founder of the OMSCS Conference. His research interests lie at the intersection of online education, learning at scale, and student experience.

Alex holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UT Austin and an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech. Before starting his current position in 2018, he worked at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI); prior to that, he worked in industry, including positions with Home Depot, Boeing, Epic Systems (nope, not the videogame company), and ConocoPhillips.

David A. Joyner

Executive Director of Online Education & OMSCS at Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus

David Joyner is Executive Director of Online Education & OMSCS in Georgia Tech's College of Computing and the Zvi Galil PEACE Chair. His research focuses on online education and learning at scale, especially as they intersect with for-credit offerings at the graduate and undergraduate levels. His emphasis is on designing learning experiences that leverage the opportunities of online learning to compensate for the loss of synchronous collocated class time. This includes leveraging artificial intelligence for student support and assignment evaluation, facilitating student communities in large online classes, and investigating strategies for maintainable and interactive presentation of online instructional material. He has authored four books in the areas of CS education, learning at scale, and AI for teaching. He is also Chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM Learning @ Scale conference, as well as the General Chair for the 2019, 2020, and 2024 conferences.

Joyner has received several awards for his work in teaching online, including the 2023 Georgia Tech Outstanding Professional Education Award, the 2022 College of Computing Outstanding Faculty Leadership Award, the 2019 USG Regents' Teaching Excellence Award for Online Teaching, the 2018 Georgia Tech Center for Teaching & Learning Curriculum Innovation Award, and the 2016 Georgia Tech College of Computing Lockheed Excellence in Teaching Award. He was also named to the Georgia Tech Alumni Association's 40 Under 40 in 2022.

Ana Mary Rusch

Associate Director of Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Student Life at Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus