THE IMPACT OF ONLINE ORIENTATION ON GRADUATE STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

This poster presentation provides an overview of a prototype format for student orientation in online graduate-level education. The new format was introduced in the newly created Master’s of Arts in Industrial and Organizational Psychology (MIO program). This program is a non-clinical online program and had a student orientation format designed based on redesigning the existing standard student orientation program. The student feedback was excellent, and this set the stage for the inclusion of student orientation in all online programs.
The Adler School is headquartered in Chicago, USA with a satellite campus in Vancouver, Canada. It caters to graduate education training in counseling and psychology. Recently, the school started offering various online courses for working professionals from all over the globe. Now, there are several online programs in existence. With the growth in demand and to ensure more compliance to quality control standards, attention has been focused on the student engagement in the form of a unique and thorough student orientation. The orientation is designed entirely on Moodle, and incorporates nine different information items which are essential background for the student to have in order to navigate through the School’s resources. Each information template had clear instructions, some form of visual and auditory presentation and an option for questions to be posted by students in the form of a chat room.
Student’s anecdotal reactions to the orientation was encouraging and indicated that they benefited from knowing about the resources and procedures that existed for them to access whenever necessary. The online orientation even seemed to improve upon the standard orientation with the range to information that was available together with the self-paced and user-friendly manner of presentation.
The technology portion of the orientation was designed by Adler Online and focused on learning of technologies supported by the school, mainly Moodle and SharePoint. The student feedback was monitored and responses were provided with a 24 hours timeframe through the use of Moodle and Web Advisor.
From the point of view of the instructor in the program, anecdotal/first-hand information, it seemed the student orientation was beneficial in preparing the students to focus on their course work and reduced the amount of time needed to explain procedures. This was considered a real value added/ time-saving feature especially since students came from all over the world.
From the point of view of the student in the program, anecdotal/first-hand information indicated that it seemed that the orientation helped to introduce them to the Adler School, their graduate program, connect with students, and learn educational technologies.
The value of this training program is to demonstrate the process of designing relevant courses; review the content of the course; identify the challenges and review participant’s evaluations.