What is Formative Research

Criteria may vary across public, private, and for profit universities for online courses around the world, but despite differences, there seem to be some successful lessons that could be shared across universities with respect to certain factors that increased student online course completion rates among certain universities’ courses. This study looked at an associate dean’s search for strategic factors that could contribute to increased online course completion rates at his university and more effectively address problems on a timely basis to improve those course completion rates. The associate dean’s collaboration with a researcher led to their conducting representative model research that revealed best practices and assessments from a number of universities and provided insights into which factors could be applied to online courses at his university. Future research could look at whether there was a substantial increase in student retention in the online courses implementing these factors to see if there may be best practices that could be generalized to other universities around the world.