Catriona Matthews, James Openshaw, and Jake Hilliard ~ Learning Designers
When we think about student retention and the factors that can lead to students withdrawing from their studies, learning design is often just the tip of the iceberg. The decision to complete a course – or to withdraw or pause studies – is often influenced by deeply personal and complex factors. Simply put, sometimes life happens!
However, research and student feedback (e.g., Greenland & Moore, 2022; Rahmani et al, 2024) indicate that when students face challenging personal circumstances, poor learning design – such as overwhelming workload, disengaging content, or accessibility barriers – can be the tipping point that leads to withdrawal. So, what can we do to design courses that better support students?
ICEBERG – Principles to support student retention
The ICEBERG principles, originally developed in 2016, outline seven evidence-based learning design principles that positively impact student retention (you can read the original report via our blog). Although these principles are foundational to the Open University’s module and learning design processes, a lot has changed and been learnt since 2016.
Across 2023-2024, OU colleagues worked to review and update the principles using internal and external research, student insights, and survey feedback. We won’t go into too much detail about this right now because we’ll be writing another blog post on the subject soon.
What does ICEBERG look like now?
You’ll be pleased to know that on the face of it the ICEBERG principles we know and love haven’t changed too much. The core acronym is the same and so are the headings. However, the updated principles now more explicitly align with inclusive design practices and address key areas like assessment, which students and research have identified as critical to retention.
We have created some resources to share the principles and help colleagues to embed them into their practice.
The ICEBERG principles are most impactful when pro-actively considered during the design of learning experiences but can also be applied retrospectively when reviewing or updating learning. We have created the ‘ICEBERG Health Check’ tool which helps you to evaluate how well your module or learning experience aligns with each of the principles.
Implementing ICEBERG principles
Our quick guide to the principles offers a condensed summary and series of design tips. It offers a one-page overview for when you might want to quickly refresh your memory or spark an idea.
Get in touch
If you use the ICEBERG principles or any of the resources shared here, we would love to hear from you. You can also get in touch if you would like to chat to the Learning Design team about any retention related support you’d find useful for your organisations, whether that’s running a session for you, helping you to use some of the resources we’ve shared via this blog, or simply for a bit of advice. We would love to hear from you.
Please contact us at: LDS-LearningDesign@open.ac.uk.
References
Van Ameijde, J., Weller, M., Cross, S. (2018). ‘Learning Design for Student Retention’. Journal of Perspectives in Applied Academic Practice, 6(2), 41-50. https://doi.org/10.14297/jpaap.v6i2.318
Greenland, S. J., & Moore, C. (2022). ‘Large qualitative sample and thematic analysis to redefine student dropout and retention strategy in open online education’. British Journal of Educational Technology, 53(3), 647-667. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13173
Rahmani, A. M., Groot, W., & Rahmani, H. (2024). ‘Dropout in online higher education: a systematic literature review’. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 21(1), 19. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-024-00450-9
Banner image credit: Photo: Canva/zanskar