Supporting students effectively in an online teaching environment at the beginning of their student journey

Abstract

We report that introducing online teaching to Access students studying a Level 3 pre-degree Higher Education module at The Open University has long-lasting beneficial effects. This study shows that a single online teaching session, which focuses on a heavily-weighted summative final piece of assessment, encourages students who participate to subsequently attend online teaching sessions on future modules to a significantly greater extent than those students who did not undertake the introductory Access module. This effect was seen in students progressing to three subsequent modules. Qualitative interviews of students who had undertaken the introductory online teaching session showed that the students could recall the session some three years after it had taken place, were able to report the benefits of having attended the session and also reported that it made them far more likely to attend future online teaching events in subsequent modules they undertook.