What are some of the factors that affect student success and failure?

Enrolling into a distance learning program is voluntary. There are many reasons that made an adult enroll in a distance learning program. Many factors affect the distance learning student. When joining a distance learning program, the learner is usually anxious about learning, or being a student again. The fear of failure is one important reason for this anxiousity. Here come the rule of the instructor, who is support to interact with the learner to encourage his to learn and gain self confidence. In the existence of factors that affect student success, there are factors that affect student failure.

Since enrollment is voluntary as I mentioned above, the percentage of students who quit is usually high. Some of them withdraw for a period of time, with the hope to come back, others quit. Research studies show that most withdraw cases has no reason.

Educational background is another important factor in the success and failure in a distance learning program. Because learning is a construction process, a student with weak background will face problems in going with a higher level program. Sometime the lack of self confidence is the reason.

Extracurricular factors can affect the success of a student in a distance education program. Most students have full time jobs, work-load. Some students have family responsibilities. Some students have health or social interests. These factors can affect the learner achievement. Sometimes they can have a good role, such as encouragement from a partner of family, support from work, and promising promotions in case of success.

Academic concerns affect the success of students in distance education program. The most important issues in academic concerns are the learner interests, the difficulty of the program (time and effort needed), degree of student or administrative support available, technology/media used, amount of feedback and support provided by the tutors/instructors, amount of interaction with instructors, tutors, content, and other students.

An important factor that can lead to success in distance education program is the intent to complete, success.

The unfamiliarity with distance learning program is a factor that makes learners afraid from joining and going with a distance education program. For most people, learning means setting in the class with teacher and other students. The lack for coverage of distance learning programs in the society and media is an important reason for that fear. As a successful growing approach of learning, distance education should work to break this barrier.

The Billings model is a model for predicting student completion of a program, The model applies variables that represent factors and relationships between them. The relationship comes through relating background variables to organizational variables. His study indicated the relationship between having a high GPA and the fast submission of assignments. The completion of class comes through the relationship between the organizational variables, the outcome/attitude variables, and environmental variables. Those who had positive environmental variables had the intent to complete the course, and this lead to the success.

The most important factors that are helping me to successfully complete this course are: Having the intention to complete the course. I had the intention to complete this course at the same moment I registered it. Because I know that I can do and learn from this course, I had no fear that I'll successfully complete the course, and learn from it. Educational background: because I have the educational background that qualifies me to complete this course, I was sure I'll complete it.

Encouragement from others: Other people who had the class or who know the instructor or know about the content of this course encouraged me to take this class. It is now my responsibility to success in this course to prove to them that I was interested and I have learned. Interaction: This course provides in a well-organized way the three types of interaction in a good way. Discussions, assignments, focus questions, homeworks, advisory, and other factors are clear approaches to the interactions. This makes it easy to learn and to success the course.