What a Difference a Day Makes: The Positive Outcomes of Early Face-to-Face Opportunities to Establish a Student Identity in Distance Learning Students New to Higher Education

Abstract

Building on the success of a model of enhanced support for its access students, the Open University in Scotland offered a series of one-day events to ‘access' students across Scotland in 2008–2009. This work and its outcomes are examined within the context of the literature on student identity as a factor in student retention, starting with Tinto (1975) and his seminal work on retention of first-year college students. The students who attended one event were considerably more likely to complete and to pass their course than comparable students. This article suggests that attending a face-to-face event helped these students to establish their identity as a university student and that this aspect of the provision may help to explain the better than average academic outcomes. These outcomes are congruent with the research in this field and they offer an element of challenge to the trend towards concentrating educational provision on online materials and computer-mediated student support. To avoid the human and resource costs of student ‘departure’ (Tinto, 1975; 1993), perhaps we need to revisit what we know about student identity and how it can be fostered at the early stages of a student's career.