For Lawrence Technological University I would suggest two measurements, the graduation rate of those attending online classes versus those using on campus study only, and secondly the alumni donation rate of campus only versus online students. These measurements will provide an insight into the number of students that are committed to the university. If a significant number of students drop or transfer before graduation that was using online studies, there may be issues. Also, the number of donations or lack thereof from online students could create future issues with funding the university.
Outside of internal measurements that can be made, LTU can also rely on studies from USNews and other evaluation sources. USNews did rank the Online Graduate Engineering studies one of the "Top Online Graduate Engineering Programs".
The audiences that they need to target with the measurements are prospective students from high schools and transfers from other colleges. They should also target LTU administration that gives online directives as well as the IT support teams. If the students are not targeted or a bad relation exists the students will not enroll no matter how good the program is. Likewise, if the LTU staff don't have confidence in the program they will make the experience poor for students.
The communications from LTU seem to be somewhat effective for me. I am a transfer student that attended a local college and am attending LTU remotely. If they didn't have effective communications I would never have considered them an option.
I also identified the graduation rate as being an important thing to measure in this example. I didn't think about the alumni donation rate though, but after reading your post I can see its use for measuring.
ReplyDeleteInteresting -- how would you measure for students that might take classes both online and on campus? Are they a separate group? (Not sure how often this happens).
ReplyDeleteI'm not very familiar with the situation of the american university, in the United States, the university will often receive donations from alumni?
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