Towards a Strategy for Improved Student Retention in Programmes of Open, Distance Education: A Case Study From the Open University UK
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Teaching at a DistanceTeaching at a distance has enjoyed a long history and is now established as a reputable method of education as evidenced by the establishment of numerous distance learning systems worldwide.One such system is the Open University UK, Britain's largest teaching institution, with 125,000 undergraduate students enrolled in the year 2000.Since first opening its doors in 1971, more than two million students have participated in studies at the Open University UK.The Open University UK has a unique mission statement -open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods, and open to ideas -an "open access" policy that attracts students from a variety of backgrounds, all seeking a divergent range of study goals.With this mission mind, it is vital that the Open University UK secure the best possible chances for its students' success.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".