The addition of audio‐teleconferencing to interactive telecourses: An experimental anaysis of drop‐out rates

Abstract

Audio‐teleconferencing which allows peer interaction has been proposed as a potentially effective means to increase student completion rates in distance education courses. This hypothesis was examined in two experiments in which audio‐conferences were added to a telecourse which also included live‐interactive (one‐way video, two‐way audio) segments. Although there were differences in the completion rates between the groups of students involved in the audio‐teleconferencing and the control groups, these were not found to be statistically significant. It is suggested that the on‐air live interactive telecourse component may have made the audio‐teleconferences redundant. There were generally high completion rates overall.