Online Studies: Blog

How Online Ready were our Summer 2019 Students?

Before we dive into the Spring 2020 semester, I wanted to take a moment to share our findings with you on our Summer 2019 students. As most of you know: we began administering an Online Readiness Assessment in October of 2018, and students complete this upon their arrival to Daytona State College during their online orientation. Shortly, we will reach one full year of data on our incoming students with this project! We are so excited about this, and we will update you when we have all of this data collected and synthesized, sometime during the Spring 2020 semester--so keep a lookout!

Pause for Applause

Before I get to that, though, I wanted to take a moment to say a giant THANK YOU! Without you, we wouldn’t be able to support these students, and work towards filling the gaps they bring into your classrooms. Your support is paramount, and as we see the retention of our online students rising, we know it’s a reflection of the work and effort you put in to support these students, day in and day out. We appreciate you! Onto the data...

Here are some of the trends we observed in Summer 2019 students, upon their entry:

First off, our summer students have scored the highest average so far, and with good reason due to our heightened number of online offerings over the summer—we would hope this would be the case. They scored an average 77.52/100 on the assessment, and this was 4 points higher than the Spring 2019 students.

• We are still seeing female students (79.18) score higher than our male students (73.47).
• Hispanic/Latino students (74.07) are still scoring lower than Black (77.88) and White (79.21) students.
• Our most online ready age groups over the summer semester were: 26-30 (83.99), 31-35 (83.61), and 41-45 (85.20). This contrasts with our Spring students, whose most online ready group were ages 31-35.
• Our lowest online ready age groups were 12-18 (69.53) and 61-70 (61.67).
• Due to what we believe to be their prior college experience, Baccalaureate students (90.84) score much higher than Associate level students (76.26).

We also measured some new data points over the summer, including:

• Online Readiness by Course
  • ENC1101 had the lowest online readiness score of our Gateway courses (74.42).
  • STA2023 had the highest online readiness score of our Gateway courses (83.72).
  • Looking at the courses that weren’t at the developmental level, and had over 25 enrolled with online readiness scores:
    • SPC2608 (68.95) and PSY1012 (69.57) had the lowest online readiness average.
    • STA2023 (83.72) and LIT2000 (83.51) had the highest online readiness average.
• Online Readiness by Campus (Campus is determined by where a student takes the majority of their classes).
  • The Online Campus had the highest online readiness average (82.02).
  • The second highest online readiness average was the New Smyrna campus (73.75), followed by Daytona in 3^rd place (71.87).
  • The lowest was the ATC (63.67), and 2^nd lowest was DeLand (64.82).

Continuing the Conversation

As we approach the following semester and receive the Fall 2019 data, we will start to make some inferences on the steps going forward, and how to use this data to best fit our institution and students. We look forward to keeping you updated, and as always feel free to let us know if you have any questions. Thank you for reading! If you haven’t already, please subscribe to stay up-to-date with the Division of Online Studies at DSC and hear the future updates we’ll be sending out.

Kara Parkes, M.A.
Online Retention Coordinator, Academic Advising
kara.parkes@daytonastate.edu | 386-506-3610
Student Online Readiness InfoGuide | Falcon Online InfoGuide