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What was the idea behind this cross-country comparison of online courses?

Bart Rienties: In an increasingly globalising world, businesses are looking for excellent graduates with international experience and who have state-of-the-art knowledge and skills. An increasing number of students is studying abroad in order to acquire international experience and increase their attractiveness for international companies.


In Europe, the number of students who are studying at a higher educational institute outside their home country has increased with 57% from 327,500 in 1998 to 515,400 in 2006. Given this increased heterogeneity of enrolments in higher education, it is reasonable to expect that transitional problems have become larger.

In addition, there is a growing concern among educators and policy makers that learners are not well prepared to start a Bachelor's or Master's programme. For example, Hoyles et al. found that students in the United Kingdom lack sufficient mathematics skills in order to start a Bachelor's programme. Several groups of students in the UK start less prepared at higher education institutes due to unfavourable social structures.


In Lithuania, high drop-out rates are partly caused by the wide opportunities for students to choose among a range of sixteen study programs. In the Netherlands, the average drop-out rates after one year of studies range between 25-30%, which is primarily attributed to transitional problems. As a result, the estimated cost of students dropping out is 180 million euros per year in the Netherlands.

An increasing number of higher educational institutions is tackling transitional problems by designing bridging courses, remedial courses, summer courses, developmental courses, or preparatory courses to equip learners with the required knowledge, skills, and competences before entering a higher education program. Bettinger and Long argue that the goal of remedial education is to provide underprepared learners with necessary skills and knowledge to succeed at university.


Although an increasing number of universities across Europe offer preparatory courses to facilitate transitional problems of students, only limited research has been published about this trend in main scientific journals. In contrast to -œtypical- distance learning courses, where participants mainly follow their complete programme in blended or virtual settings, participants will only follow (online) education for the duration of several weeks in most preparatory courses. Despite the increased usage of IT in remedial education, limited research has been conducted in order to assess what successful ingredients are for effective online remedial education.

Therefore, in the EU project "S.T.E.P.", we are currently analyzing how teachers across Europe are designing effective online courses and trying to identify common characteristics of effective online courses.

Which providers and suppliers did you choose?

Bart Rienties: An online questionnaire was built based upon the literature review and a needs analysis and was distributed via the partners of the S.T.E.P project, in particular via the EARLI and EDINEB network to teachers, designers, and organisers of remedial courses, with an open invitation to share their course designs. A total of 118 remedial courses reported by 84 respondents from 65 institutions and from 22 countries were gathered in the period February-May 2009.

Which methods did you use to compare the data and why?

Bart Rienties: Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) using SPSS was done to determine the independent dimensions explaining most of the variance in the dataset. A total of 47% of the variance was explained by the first five dimensions found. The decision to ignore higher dimensions was based on Cronbach's alpha (0.73 for dimension 6, and lower for the higher ones), as well as on the result that explained that variance only increases slowly for dimensions higher than five (about four percent extra variance explained for each added dimension).


In addition, the SPSS "TwoStep clustering" technique was used to divide all courses into clusters based on similarity, with Schwarz's Bayesian criterion (BIC) as the clustering criterion, and log-likelihood as the distance measure.

Did the comparison consider special user target groups?

Bart Rienties: If you refer to users with disabilities, we didn't. But if you refer to more general target groups, we primarily focused on teachers who offered courses to help students and professionals with transitional problems (that is from high school to bachelor, from bachelor to master, or from vocational to bachelor/master education).

Did you get a ranking of what works in the end?

Bart Rienties: We found that we were able to cluster the 118 different courses into six clusters. We are currently still working on this, as our primary analysis was to find clusters of courses with similar characteristics. Afterwards, we will link these characteristics with the (perceived) performance of courses by the teachers and students. So this is still work in progress.

Which online course is your front-runner?

Bart Rienties: Again this depends on what you are looking for. As we tried to find common characteristics of preparatory courses and determine which pedagogical scenarios across Europe are chosen by teacher, we will later assess which ICT tools and pedagogical scenarios are more appropriate given the context. However, given that the contexts will differ tremendously across Europe, it will be hard to find a one-size-fits-all solution.

Bart Rienties will present his results on Friday, 04 December 2009, 11:45 - 13:30, in the session "From Learning 1.0 to Learning 3.0: Still a Long Way to Go?", room "Schöneberg"