Enabling connections and persistence in a distributed learning community

Concerns about rates of retention and attrition in Higher Education, and the appropriateness of the linguistic terminology used to discuss the phenomenon, date back almost a century. For example, in the nineteen sixties in the United States a Harvard Educational review article reflected on forty years of research and the lack of evidence that attrition rates had risen since the nineteen twenties, disputing the 40-60 % estimates found in much of the contemporary research (Eckland, 1964). Eckland concluded that, in any case, 'most drop-outs came back' (p.405). Relative to the wealth of published research literature pertaining to undergraduate retention and attrition since the time of Professor Eckland, there has been relatively little publication of evidence based research on retention related specifically to enabling programs. This study seeks to address this imbalance even if in a very small way and continues previous work on the topic by Tas Bedford, (Bedford, 2009) whose research on student retention on the Tertiary Preparation Program (TPP) was presented at previous Enabling conferences. Information presented here is from a wider study investigating the student experience of factors that influence completion of study on TPP, a distance education course leading to undergraduate entry offered by the University of Southern Queensland (USQ). Discussion will begin with a short description of methodology adopted and go on to discuss constraints to study. The strategies used by participants to manage constraints will also be outlined, along with discussion of the nature of the competencies that underpin resilience and persistence with study in an enabling program