EDD-FPX8030_StraccioneAnthony_Assessment2-1

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Delaware County Community College *

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MISC

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Communications

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Apr 3, 2024

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docx

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1 Assessment 2: Frame Your Issue and Collect Your Data Anthony Straccione School of Public Service and Education, Capella University EDD-FPX8030: Investigating Problems of Practice Marie Orizondo-Harding July 9, 2023

2 Framing an Organizational Issue and Collecting Data While online learning has been around for a few decades already, very recently this modality has become increasingly popular. Students in various levels of their education can now more conveniently complete their courses and even entire programs from anywhere they have an internet connection. Colleges and universities must find ways to offer more courses and entire programs using online modalities or likely suffer continued drops in both enrollment and retention rates. The most important thing to understand about your conceptual framework is that it is primarily a conception or model of what is out there that you plan to study, and of what is going on with these things and why—a tentative theory of the phenomena that you are investigating, (Maxwell, 2013). The discussions and information presented in the following sections will identify and frame an organizational issue that relates to a problem of practice at a local community college in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Significant Problem of Practice The problem at the community college is that they do not offer enough online courses for the current student demand. The number of students requesting online course modalities over the last few semesters has increased across many of the majors that the college currently offers. Unfortunately, it is not always feasible for the college to provide multiple course modalities for all of the many courses that are offered each semester. Additionally, the college does not even offer any of its current majors as completely online degree programs. During the pandemic, all courses at the college had to switch to fully online courses. This went on for 5 semesters in a row with some courses be offered as completely online and others either being offered as synchronous or asynchronous, which used Zoom meetings to replace the traditional classroom. After the first year, it was noticed that many students were becoming more

3 and more used to the online format, regardless of whether they had Zoom meetings times or not. As the pandemic started to wind down, and the college started offering traditional classes, it was noticed that the online classes were being filled during registration much more quickly than the traditional classes were. Many of the online classes were filling to capacity while the traditional classes were actually seeing fewer enrollments with some of the traditional classes having to be cancelled due to low enrollment. Already struggling to meet enrollment projections at this time, the college decided to survey all current students to gain insight on how they preferred to now take their classes. Despite the surveys, along with the current enrollment trend, showing that most of the college’s students now preferred to take their classes in an online format, the college struggled with providing as many online modalities as it should have. While the college is now offering more online class modalities then it ever had in the past, there is still a need to increase both the amount of online classes offered each semester, as well as a need for the college to start offering entire degree and certificate programs in online modalities. Guiding Research Questions What is the difference in current enrollment numbers in regards to online course offerings versus traditional course offerings? How many courses are being offered in regards to online courses versus traditional courses? Which current course modality offering has the highest overall enrollments rates? Which course modalities are more easily staffed? Which programs have the most online course offerings and what are their retention rates compared to programs with few or no online course offerings?

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