P. Adamopoulos. ICIS, Association for Information Systems, (2013)The findings of our analysis illustrate that Professor(s) is the most important factor in online course retention and has the largest positive effect on the probability of a student to successfully complete a course. The sentiment of students for Assignments and Course Material also has positive effects on the successful completeness of a course whereas the Discussion Forum has a positive effect on the probability to partially complete a course. Furthermore, self-paced courses have a negative effect, compared to courses that follow a specific timetable. In addition, the difficulty, the workload, and the duration of a course have a negative effect. On the other hand, for the more difficult courses, self-paced timetable, longer duration in weeks, and more workload have a positive effect on the probability to successfully complete a course. Besides, final exams and projects, open textbooks, and peer assessment have also positive effects. Moreover, whether a certificate is awarded upon the successful completion of a course also affects retention. Additionally, the better a university is considered (i.e. higher ranking), the more likely that a student will successfully complete a course. Further, our results illustrate that the courses which belong to the academic disciplines of Business and Management, Computer Science, and Science have a positive significant effect in contrast to courses in other disciplines (i.e. Engineering, Humanities, and Mathematics). Finally, attrition was not found to be related with student characteristics (i.e. gender, formal education)..
N. Admodisastro, and G. Kotonya. Proceedings of the 2011 European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA), volume 6903/2011 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 180-189. Springer Verlag, (2011)
M. Aehnelt, H. Diener, and A. Müller. Tagungsband 10.~Fachtagung Digital Engineering zum Planen, Testen und Betreiben technischer Systeme, 16.~IFF-Wissenschaftstage, page 139--146. Magdeburg, Fraunhofer-Institut für Fabrikbetrieb und -Automatisierung (IFF), (June 2013)
M. Aehnelt, H. Schulz, and B. Urban. Advances in Visual Computing: 9th International Symposium, ISVC 2013, Rethymnon, Crete, Greece, Proceedings, Part II, volume 8034 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin, (2013)