Presiding: CLARK J. HICKMAN, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Presenters: BARBARA A. MACAULAY, UMass Online; ERIC RIEDEL, Walden University; KATHRYN DeBOER, Walden University

      The panelists will discuss past and ongoing research efforts in the areas of retention and online learning. For example, one study at Walden examined 453 course sections nested within 12 different courses taught in 2005. Perceived instructional performance did impact within-course retention in an inverted curvilinear relationship. Poorly-rated instructors had relatively low rates of within-course retention but there were fewer differences in within-course retention for the highest-rated instructors. This relationship was stronger for courses taken early in the program. In latter-occurring courses, program-level factors appeared to predominate with the specific course itself, independent of instructional quality, predicting within-course retention rates.