One of the keynote speakers was Professor Ingrid Day, the Assistant Vice-Chancellor: Academic and Open Learning. Some of what I gleaned is reproduced below. I have contacted Ingrid and asked her to look over my notes. She very kindly did so, and corrected and elaborated where necessary, but any errors or omissions are mine.
Ingrid began her academic career in distance education. Part of her talk was about her experiences in that area, and in passing she outlined what she self-depreciatingly termed "no-brainer" ideas. However, I consider them valuable pointers that could be utilised or adapted for other distance learning programmes. They must be, to have resulted in the reduction of a 50% drop out rate reducing to zero!
- Set a weekly quiz that students must visit the website to do. In the first week run this daily. This gets the students' heads into the course
- Individually mark and respond to those quizzes with a brief comment to start up a personal relationship--they should not be marked automatically. The objective is to make the learning fun
- Initial writing tasks should be looked over for content, not grammar. This was so that the course was not threatening, but rather confidence building. Somehow these were visible to all the students and open for comments. This promoted peer engagement.
- All first year students were placed into mentoring groups. Student mentors were trained and were assigned 10 'mentees each'. They received no money - and didn't expect to. They were happy to be helpful and claimed they got more out of the duty than those they helped.
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