Educational success in adult long distance learning

Project partners: Steffen Altmann (IZA), Ingo Isphording (IZA), Jonas Radbruch (IZA)

With the growing importance of lifelong learning and changing demand for educational and professional profiles, long distance learning programs are becoming increasingly important. Due to their flexible nature, distance learning programmes promise unprecedented opportunities to achieve individual educational goals while at the same time ensuring a high degree of compatibility between studies, work and private life.

Against this background, IZA researchers are building a unique field laboratory in cooperation with a private online university. The project promises new insights into the determinants of study success in a digital educational environment, the interplay between workload and success in part-time study programmes and the effectiveness of educational policy measures in digital learning environments. The research questions investigated in the project are to be analysed with a combination of regular student surveys, high-frequency administrative data on individual learning behaviour and a series of controlled field trials. A particular focus is on the analysis of behavioural economic factors that can influence study success, as well as on the development and evaluation of personalised, behaviour-based instruments to support study success in a distance e-learning environment.