2026 State of Inclusive Excellence
Our learner success work contributes to improving educational systems by creating evidence based, equitable measures that reflect the lived experiences of adult and online learners. By redefining persistence and progress around actual enrollment behaviors, monitoring academic excellence and drop/fail (DF) rates, and centering belonging on instructor care, mattering, and inclusion, we help students access and pursue their individual educational goals.
Oregon State University Ecampus has already put in substantial work to make education accessible for individuals who cannot travel to a physical campus and take courses in person. That group covers an extraordinarily diverse array of people, and our work explores outcomes for all these students regardless of background. Understanding the reasons why some students persist at OSU while others do not ultimately allows us to maximize students’ potential at OSU regardless of their background.
Our learner success framework integrates community engaged approaches by grounding all indicators in the lived experiences, enrollment behaviors, and expressed needs of the online student community. Our work is primarily institutional in nature (retention, persistence, etc.), but the added understanding of student belonging helps us create and develop a community of support and understanding that will give all students greater and more personalized opportunities to succeed and achieve their goals. We treat student belonging and performance as a shared responsibility between students, faculty, and staff. By aligning success metrics with national standards, student driven insights, and student community identities, we strengthen the relevance, equity, and impact of our work.
Our learner success framework reflects OSU’s land grant mission by defining retention, persistence, and progression in ways that honor the lived experiences of working and part time students who are pursuing education entirely online. Through thoughtful analysis of student success metrics and student belonging, our work guides divisional and institutional practices that support non-traditional and traditional students on their paths to degree completion.
We support student success and belonging by rethinking the typical success indicators that colleges and universities traditionally rely on and by directly asking students what contributes to their sense of belonging. By considering the real behaviors, needs, and lived experiences of online learners, we can develop measures that more accurately reflect student success that aren’t always captured with traditional metrics. Additionally, we share this information with staff and instructors who work with students to guide and improve their work as they support students.
We ensure our work is inclusive, culturally responsive, and grounded in the lived experiences of our learners by designing success measures that reflect the realities of adult, online, and part time students. Our persistence and retention metrics are built around actual enrollment behaviors—recognizing flexible, nonlinear pathways—and our belonging indicators prioritize instructor care, mattering, inclusivity, and staff support based on research into how online students define community.
National or statewide recognition of our learner success work would highlight the significant contributions our framework makes to supporting adult and online learners at OSU. The indicators and outcomes we track demonstrate a rigorous, evidence based approach that aligns success definitions with the lived experiences of Ecampus students, supports equitable learning pathways, and drives meaningful improvements in retention, persistence, course success, belonging, and graduation.
I am hopeful because our data show that OSU’s online students persist, succeed academically, and experience meaningful belonging at consistently high levels. Strong retention, lower DF rates than campus peers, high honor roll attainment, and positive belonging scores demonstrate that our learner success framework is already generating significant impact.
Future opportunities include further refining flexible and inclusivity metrics, strengthening belonging and mattering across all student groups, deepening equity focused analyses using longitudinal data, and scaling the instructional and support practices that contribute to strong course and program outcomes.
