This research project asks the question:  How much does student interaction and involvement in an online discussion format drive the levels of student retention and overall success? The question emerged for me in the process of teaching Communication Studies 105:  Fundamentals of Public Speaking in an online format.  This course could properly be called an online hybrid course as it meets five times a semester for the presentation of required speeches.  I have been teaching the course in this format for over three years.  I only recently began to add a component to the courses that required the students to respond to specific prompts as well as their fellow classmates' responses to these prompts.  I wondered if the increased interaction might also increase their overall performance in the class as well as the likelihood that they finish the course.  My proposal, therefore, is to answer-or attempt to answer-such questions.  I propose to assign 10 specific writing assignments over the course of the semester requiring the student to interact with other by way of the online discussion board and email.  Assignments 1-3 will be to post and respond (with a set of criteria I will provide) to specific topics for each required speech.  Assignments 4-6 will be to post and respond (with a set of detailed check-points) to another student's outline for each speech.  Assignment 7 will be to post and respond to another student's post about speech apprehension, and assignments 8-10 will be to email a detailed set of comments (which will include both strengths and places to improve) about their performance to a fellow student for the first, second and third speech. 

At the end of the semester, I will ask students to respond anonymously to the following assessment questions: 
(1)  Please tell me how valuable the posting and feedback of speech topics on our discussion board was to your overall success in the course?
(2)  Please tell me how valuable the posting of and classmate feedback to each of your speech outlines was to your overall success in the course? 
(3)  How helpful was getting feedback about your speech performance and potential apprehension for the first speech? 
(4)  What about any of these activities created an opportunity for you to learn more in this course? 
(5)  What changes would you make to the format and design of the online interaction in a class such as this one?

Since I teach two online sections of COMS 105 every semester, I plan to omit the above assignments in one of those sections.  Thus, my intention is to assess the level of retention in each class (What percentage of students who began in each class finished each class?) and overall grades (Is there a difference in the overall grades for each section?).  The timeline for my project is the entire 16 week semester.

The objectives of my project are two-fold.  First I want to assess the value of online interaction on student retention.  Second I want to assess the value of online interaction on overall student success in the course.  This project is relevant to student learning because it may give us information on best practices with regard to online teaching.  Since there is such a drive to increase online offerings of various courses, we ought to assess the types of learning that work best in such a format.

The first evaluation methodology for this project will be the completion of assigning each online assignment.  The second will be tracking the number of students who continue to complete the course assignments and attend class meetings.  I will measure the number of students who stay actively involved in the course (by completing the monthly assignments and attending the meetings) each month at our scheduled meeting times.  I will keep track of each online assignment I assign (approximately three a month) and be able to assess my own progress this way. Then, I will keep a detailed record of the number of students who maintain their participation in the class and update it at every monthly meeting. 

I learned through the Institute of Teaching and Learning that collaborative learning is usually an anchor in success for college students.  They do not have such collaboration in an online class in a traditional way, but we can engage them in this type of learning in alternative ways if we think creatively.  Creating more opportunity for students to use each other to learn, grow and develop can aid student learning, I propose, and the Institute helped me to recognize this fact.

I hope to learn how to better my student retention in the online format.  I also hope to create better ways to teach the public speaking course that might compensate for its less interpersonal climate in an online format. Since public speaking is, by nature, a course for which student apprehension is particularly high, we need to find new ways to make students comfortable and keep them interested in the material within this format. I hope to get information on how students learn in this venue, so I can continue to help them learn this very valuable subject.