Why Students Drop Out Of Distance Learning Courses

But does the fact that so many students are dropping out of online courses that they have enrolled in really a cause for concern? And more importantly, is it indeed in a realistic commentary on the relative merits of an online education versus the traditional school system? Some industry experts are of the opinion that while the dropout rate will result in much fewer students actually accomplishing the entire length of their particular course, this alone is not necessarily a sign of academic failure or negligence. These industry pundits further suggest that for many people who have opted to drop out of their online course, this is actually a well thought out and considered plan of action that may in fact have long term beneficial effects on their educational pursuits.

To support this theory, its proponents have turned their attention to the profile of the typical online student. Many students who choose to go for an online course are generally a little bit older than students from a traditional school.

They would also presumably have considerably more life experiences and academic history behind them. It is in fact their past experiences with school and life in general, along with their current professional, educational and personal status that make them ideal candidates for online learning.

One of the drawbacks of their being a little bit older however is that online students tend to have a pretty full schedule with things such as a full time job, family obligations and various other concerns already taking up a considerable chunk of their time. Factor in the time that is needed in order to fulfill the obligations of their online courses and you can easily see how sometimes there are simply not enough hours in the day to devote to their online lessons.

For people who find themselves in this situation of having bitten off more than they can chew, sometimes the only logical choice is to drop that particular course. In this way they can manage to gain a little bit of distance-a breather if you will-before having to retake that particular course again. This move would also have the broader advantage of preventing that one class from pulling down their grade point average or GPA.

To be sure the dropout trend should continue to be monitored closely and steps must be taken to address the root causes.

But to point to these dropout incidents as an indicator of the failure of the online learning system would be somewhat misguided.

One of the things which has caused some degree of concern among observers of the online educational method is the seeming increase in the number of students who have dropped out of their classes. In light of this development, some educational analysts have predicted that the rate of student dropout will be shown to be significantly higher for online schools than for traditional learning institutions. The more critical of these observers have even seen this increase in dropout rates as an indication of the ineffectiveness of online learning methods as a viable alternative to traditional school instruction.

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