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Successful Online Course Retention At Marylhurst University Constructing A Model For Online Course Retention Using Grounded Theory, Vincent Schreck

Dissertations and Theses

Over the past 6 years, the course retention rate for Marylhurst University's (MU) online courses was 91%, which is within four percentage points of its on-campus course retention rate (Schreck, 2002). This appears to contradict a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that stated, "Although there is significant variation among institutions with some reporting course-completion rates of more than 80% and others finding that fewer than 50% of distance-education students finish their courses, several administrators concur that course-completion rates are often 10-20 percentage points higher in traditional courses than in distance offerings" (Carr, 2000). Recent studies (Beatty-Gunter 2001; …