English Urgent Homework Eng

Jenkins 1

Rob Jenkins

Professor Reynolds

ENGL 1102

11 July 2012

Online Classes and College Completion

In response to the Obama Administration’s “College Completion” agenda, states are rushing to produce plans for increasing the number of college graduates. This is basically a good thing. However, the problem is that most of these plans involve adding to the number of online classes already being offered and to the number of students currently taking those classes—despite the fact that, according to several recent studies, students in online classes are less likely to complete, not more likely. This is especially true for community college students and other “at-risk” groups, meaning that the very students who are the targets of the completion agenda will probably be most harmed by it.

The solution to this problem is for colleges, first of all, to do everything in their power to encourage at-risk students to take courses on campus, where they can receive the additional support that they need. Administrators must acknowledge that online classes require a special set of skills, as well as personal qualities like motivation and perseverance, and stop promoting those classes as if they were some sort of magic bullet, an “easy way” for students to get their degrees. For those students who do wish to take online classes, colleges must provide mandatory training and tutorials to ensure that they are equipped and prepared to succeed in the online environment.

My audience for this essay will be college and university administrators who are interested in promoting college completion and who also have the genuine best interests of students at heart. For the purposes of this essay, I will adopt the role of an experienced college administrator who is knowledgeable about completion and who has managed online courses. My purpose is to persuade administrators not to rely on online classes as a means of increasing completion, but to search for other, more effective solutions.

My research into this topic has already identified a number of useful sources, including the following:

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “Boosting College Graduation Rates and Connecting

Degrees to Jobs.” www.gatesfoundation.org. N.d. Web. 24 February 2012.

Brown, Ron. “Community College Students Perform Worse Online Than Face to Face.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 June

2011. Web. 26 February 2012.

Institute of Education Sciences. National Center for Education Statistics. “ Enrollment.”

Fast Facts. 2011. Web. 25 February 2012.