Seeking the Recipe for Success in Distance Education: Lessons from a Nutrition Course

There is much debate as to how best to exploit the potential of the internet when designing distance education (DE) courses; the formula for success is still to be determined. In this Darwinian struggle for market share Athabasca University (AU) has established itself as the leading DE university in Canada. Courses at AU include four in nutrition. Enrollment growth has been rapid in recent years. We investigated factors that may be responsible for this success. We garnered the opinions of former nutrition students using a mailed questionnaire (response rate: 57.1%; 176 returned). We investigated the following factors with respect to the highest enrollment nutrition course: (1) reasons for students to take the course at AU (rather than a similar course at another university); (2) student s opinions of the course; (3) student s preferences for receiving course materials in a printed format or via a computer; and (4) student s opinions of AU. The results show that the main reason for taking the nutrition course by DE is due to the flexibility of the DE itself that allows learning while working and managing the family commitment. The preferred learning materials format sent to them for the course are print based and this appears to be important as only 4% of students prefer to receiving their learning materials via a computer. The results also revealed that AU is well respected institution by the students. This is evident as only 11% of the respondents feel that AU courses are of lower academic credibility than similar courses at other Canadian universities.