Tracking retention and building community in distance music study

• Project Team: Alexander KolassaLilian Simones
• Subject Discipline: Arts and Humanities
• Theme: Employability/CareersEquality, diversity and inclusion
• Project Aim: Enables more students to achieve their study goalsEnhances employability and career progressionImproves and enhance the learning experience of studentsPromotes equality diversity and inclusion including reduction of degree awarding gap
• Status: Live
• Date: March 2022 to January 2023

There are three objectives of this project (presented in order of priority):

1. To investigate and identify reasons for relatively low retention rates (to other disciplines) for students specialising in music at the Open University in the early stages of their degree, and to make appropriate recommendations to rectify this.
2. Through the interpretation of quantitative and qualitative student data, include otherwise hard to access student voice, build a case for developing a more engaged qualification-level programme of activities so as to develop a sense of music-student identity and community.
3. To inform future department initiatives and curriculum development going forward, influencing developing practice-orientated provision at the Open University.

Despite distance and online learning constituting the fastest growing areas of education worldwide (TranslateMedia, 2018), students in those courses of study have been shown to have consistently lower rates of course completion and retention compared to their in-person student contemporaries (Woodley & Simpson, 2014). This is a familiar story: factors for low retention are many, encompassing an interleaving combination of work, life, and time demands; not to mention the challenges associated with the management of expectations, difficulty developing required metacognitive skills, and isolation, particularly where there is a lack of opportunity to work with peers, or where there are fewer initiatives to promote a sense of belonging and of being in a community among other learners (Brown, Hughes, Keppell, Hard, & Smith, 2015; Mallman & Lee, 2016; O’Shea, Stone, & Delahunty, 2015). In addressing lower retention rates for music at the Open University, in particular, we hypothesize that this sense of belonging is a particularly salient factor. Music, we contend is a participatory and social activity (Johnson, 2017), and its online pedagogy must always be attentive to the social and practical motivations that condition its study at the intersection of the practical and the scholarly. This project, then, will give us an opportunity to consider ways of supplementing those aspects of the music curriculum which already engage with this principle.

Though scarcely explored in a literature focussed on campus-based student needs, we will build on recent research (Farrell & Bruton, 2020) that finds successful online student engagement—and, indeed, retention—can be influenced by a number of psychosocial factors. In fashioning our methodology, we will draw then on the work of Kahu (2013) whose conceptual framework of dynamic engagement, influence, and consequence enriches more established behavioural, psychological, socio-cultural and holistic approaches too. Through understanding more about what structural and psychosocial factors enable or hinder OU students from remaining engaged in relevant modules (qualifications R25, R14 and W65, modules A111, A113, and A234) , we will acknowledge our learners’ uniqueness, hear their views and use their feedback. We will also pilot an approach that can potentially apply to other study areas in the OU. The implications ultimately will be reflected in practice through the gathering of relevant information that will allow us to continuously implement the Advance HE framework for student access, retention, attainment, and progression in HE (2015) at the OU.

The project’s main research questions may be summarised as thus:

1. What structural and psychosocial factors enable (or impede) OU student engagement and success, perhaps hindering or causing them to quit, in modules A111, A113, and A234 in qualifications R25, R14, and W65?
2. In the students’ view, how can the OU promote increased learning engagement and enhanced learning experiences for students in these modules?