Exploring Factors Influencing e-Learning Dropout Rates in the Post-COVID-19 Era

Exploring Factors Influencing E-Learning Dropout Rates In The Post-Covid-19 Era

The global increase in Internet access has made online learning a popular mode of 21^st century learning (Khan, 2021). However, there are parallel concerns about the student dropout rate and potential socioeconomic, infrastructural, and technological barriers that impede access to e-learning platforms (Belando-Montoro et al., 2022). Indeed, student participation and retention in graduate and postgraduate courses attracted scholarly concern before the education technology explosion prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic (Friðriksdóttir, 2018). Amid the last few years’ exponential increase in e-learning use, universities have struggled to reduce high online student dropout rates. According to Greenland et al. (2022), e-learning students are “2.5 times more likely than on-campus students to withdraw without a qualification”.

There are several reasons for addressing factors leading to high student dropouts in online learning. Firstly, as Yilmaz and Karataş (2022) aptly argued, student dropout has a deleterious effect on the image of the institution. Additionally, student dropout has a negative effect on the financial position of the institutions which heavily rely on fees, as well as students who may dropout without completing the course for which they enrolled (Yılmaz & Karataş, 2022). Student dropout leads to increased poverty and social exclusion, which impede the development of many societies as access to knowledge and training is critical to productivity and competitiveness in the knowledge society (Kiprianos & Mpourgos, 2022).

Universities’ uptake of e-learning continues to fuel an expansion of the online technology industry. By 2021, the global e-learning market was worth an estimated USD 315 billion, and projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 20% between 2022 and 2028 (Dubey et al., 2023). This has redoubled enthusiasm for e-learning by those who extol its enhancement of access to education, improvement of the quality of learning, and reduction of the cost of providing education (Panigrahi et al., 2018). Nevertheless, the advent and expansion of e-learning brings its share of obstacles (Hauala et al., 2022), one of which is the high student attrition rate (Panigrahi et al., 2018; Smith & Ferguson, 2005).

Estimates on student attrition rates vary. For example, some estimates (Eriksson et al., 2017) put the attrition rates in massive open online courses (MOOCs) at 90%. Others estimate that attrition rates range between 40% and 80% (Bawa, 2016), 25% and 40% (Lykourentzou et al., 2009), 10% to 20% (Christensen & Spackman, 2017), and even 100% (Jacobsen, 2019). While statistics vary, there seems to be unanimity that e-learning has brought about higher levels of student attrition. This is despite the fact that many stakeholders regard student retention as an objective measure of the quality of education that an institution offers, as well being used as its performance measure (Lykourentzou et al., 2009).