Prospective Online Students Very Interested in a Mix of Async Format with Sync Sessions

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I have long covered the annual Voice of the Online Learner (VOL) survey, as it has been one of the best sources of what students and prospective students think about online postsecondary education. Not what others think about student views, but direct student views - prospective, current, and recent graduates of online programs. This year’s release of the survey is the first under the ownership of Risepoint, the rebranding of Academic Partnerships after its acquisition of Wiley Education Services.

The lineage of the VOL surveys starts with the Online College Students (OCS) 2012 survey from Aslanian Market Research and Learning House, and bifurcates into parallel VOL and OCS surveys in 2021, with Risepoint putting out VOL and Education Dynamics putting out OCS. Both surveys are valuable and have been models of transparency.

Methodology and Credibility

An important aspect of both VOL and OCS is the long history and credibility, despite the messy family dynamics due to corporate acquisitions. Part of the credibility of these two survey series is that the student respondents were not exclusively in Learning House or Wiley or Academic Partnerships OPM programs. But I have to note that this has changed somewhat over time. While Education Dynamics’ OCS survey respondents come from an external panel (not tied to Education Dynamics clients), Risepoint’s VOL survey has changed its approach.

• In the 2021 and 2022 surveys, VOL’s external panel to internal panel (tied to company client programs) ratio was roughly 1:1.

• In the 2023 survey, the external to internal ratio was roughly 1.4.

• In the 2024 survey, there was a significant change with the external to internal ratio was roughly 0.4; for the first time, students and prospects in the sponsoring company’s client programs made up the majority of respondents.

This change for Risepoint’s VOL does not mean that the survey is no longer trustworthy, but it does mean that it is getting closer to a transparency report and not a national representative sample. What is important for this post is that it is different than in previous years, which impacts how well we can track longitudinal trends.

Why would OPM and OPM-adjacent companies spend the time and money on these public survey series? There is clearly an altruistic service to the community angle, which is admirable. But there is also a direct value to the companies (brand awareness by sponsor placement as well as press releases and interviews) and an important indirect value. That latter one derives from the message that we understand online students and prospects, and you can see our investment and analysis in the survey reports. One of the primary reasons that higher education institutions hire OPM or OPM-adjacent companies is based on their market knowledge of different student types.

With the 2024 VOL survey, I am seeing some concerning trends in the reporting of results, including 175 point fonts spoon-feeding results at the expense of nuance. And this is relevant to the topic at hand of synchronous learning sessions.

Listening to Students on Learning Opportunities

I bring up this context due to my initial reaction to this year’s VOL survey, particularly on a topic I’ve been tracking since 2021 (thanks in large part to surveys such as VOL). Namely, the change in student perceptions on asynchronous vs. synchronous course design such that it is a mistake to treat these as binary choices. From my 2021 coverage:

One VOL question asked “When thinking about the format of a program, which options do you prefer from the following options listed below?” And the course format options were listed as “Asynchronous learning (i.e., no specific live online class times)” or “Synchronous learning (i.e., all students are online at the same time for at least some classes).”

That is a binary choice between 100% asynchronous learning and somewhere between 0 - 99% asynchronous. This choice is not quite asynchronous vs. synchronous (think Zoom U during the pandemic) and has some nuance that I suspect was not fully understood by students and prospective students.

Useful Follow Up Questions Added

The 2022 VOL survey asked an additional question of “How often would you be willing to log in at a specific time to join a required discussion or virtual lecture with your instructor and classmates for each class that you attend?” And the responses showed that 79% of students were open to some level of synchronous sessions.

Note that this question is not for a preference, but for a willingness. But it does represent a growing view of students open to a mix of asynchronous and synchronous methods.

The 2023 results were similar (79% willing for synchronous sessions), and the report added yet another question to get at the reason for this willingness.

Finally Getting to the Lede

All of this lead to my surprise in reading the 2024 VOL survey from Risepoint and its summary findings about course format. First, the numbers preferring asynchronous course format jumped from 71% in 2023 to 76% in 2024.

There’s a change this year in the report, as Risepoint no longer includes the actual question or the full choices with the results as in past years (a change I hope is reversed). And Risepoint went further in its text description.

Wow. That statement essentially argues that students have little desire “to even log on” for synchronous online classes, when the most recent years showed 79% willing to do so at least once per term. The wording is different and conflates the campus visits and synchronous sessions, but it seemed to represent a significant change.

Later in the report, however, I found the questions about willingness to have synchronous sessions separated from the course format question (in previous reports the questions naturally flowed from one to the other, but this year the first question was reported on page 10, and the follow up questions were on page 18.

So the change from 2023 to 2024 is a five-point jump in preference for fully asynchronous (71% to 76%), and the change in willingness is a five-point decrease (79% to 74%). That’s not a huge change, especially when considering the corresponding change in student panel selection (from equal mix external and internal to mostly internal). This mix is important, as Risepoint’s historical course design and program types are heavy on asynchronous methods, which could bias the results when comparing year-to-year results.

What the data certainly don’t support in my opinion is the conclusion that there is a big shift towards fully asynchronous formats without any synchronous sessions. Maybe there’s a change worth tracking, but there are even bigger changes in methodology.

Transparency for the Win

I asked the Risepoint team if they could explain these findings better by providing the actual questions in the survey, which to their credit they did, with no hesitation or defensiveness. And lo and behold the survey asked the same question as in previous - there are changes in report-writing but not apparently in the survey design.

I also asked for a crosstab showing the results of the willingness question against whether we were dealing with current students or prospective students. Again, the team came through, but note that the choices changed (from 1 - 5 times per course in 2023 to the more useful once a week / every other week / month / course in 2024).

There was an increase over the past year in the percentage of students that truly want fully asynchronous (no willingness for any sync sessions) from 21 to 25%. Interesting, but taken with a grain of salt given the changes in methodology.

I have highlighted two numbers above - the willingness to participate in at least some synchronous sessions - for both current students and prospective students. 67% of current students are willing and 89% of prospective students are willing to log in to synchronous sessions, and most of these ‘willing’ students would like synchronous sessions once per week.

If you look at the follow-up question on why they would like to attend synchronous sessions, the answers did not say I’ll do this only because it’s required. Instead, there were real reasons for being open or wanting synchronous sessions. Better learning in a group setting, real-time instructor explanations and answering questions, peer learning, creating community, and building a network.

A New Lede

This conclusion could have been the lede for the survey release. Nearly nine in ten prospective online students would be willing to attend synchronous sessions in an otherwise asynchronous course to improve their ability to learn the material, and most of those would prefer once per week.

I’ll repeat my conclusions from 2021.

I think that the challenge, or opportunity, over the next few years is for schools to figure out how to combine asynchronous methods that preserve anywhere / anytime access with synchronous methods, increasingly with video, that meaningfully increase student engagement. That’s not a new concept, but as William Gibson noted, “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” How do we increase the large-scale adoption of the methods that work? That is the key opportunity.

On a secondary note, I appreciate the Risepoint team’s transparency, but I truly hope that they reverse course on some of the methodology and report-writing changes to maintain the integrity and usefulness of the Voice of the Online Learner survey series.

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