The Missing Middle of Student Success, Part 2

Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Sign up for the On Student Success newsletter and get your own copy of the news that matters sent to your inbox every week.

This is the second in a two-part series on the neglect of course design in student success. Read Part 1 here.

Next week, I will be attending Student Success US 2026 here in Salt Lake City. If you will be there and want to catch up, send me a note.

In Part 1 of this piece, I argued that there is a missing middle in how we think about student success. We have invested heavily in understanding the characteristics of students, providing services to support them, and measuring their eventual outcomes. We have paid considerably less attention to the design of the courses in which they spend much of their time.

What makes this particularly curious is that we know enough about the importance of teaching, assessment, feedback, and the structure of courses to make this neglect difficult to explain.

So why does the course remain relatively invisible in student success?

I think the answer lies partly in how the field of student success has developed. The assumptions we bring to student success shape the questions we ask in our research, the data we collect, and the technologies and practices we develop. What we learn from research and what we do in practice, in turn, reinforce many of our original assumptions.

Over time, these mutually reinforcing elements help establish the parameters of the field: what we think of as student success problems, how we investigate them, what interventions we consider, and who we think should be involved in addressing them. Several aspects of this are particularly relevant to the neglect of course design.

How we define and study student success

Student success as student failure

In practice, student success has all too often become the study of student failure. This happens in two distinct but related ways.

First, much of the student success enterprise focuses on identifying struggling students, predicting who is likely to stop out, and intervening when things go wrong. Given the name of the field, there is something ironic about how much of our attention is devoted to studying the pathology of student failure rather than understanding how and under what conditions students succeed.

This emphasis on failure is embedded in our systems and data. Early alerts identify students who miss assignments, stop attending, or receive poor grades. Predictive models use demographic and historical academic data to identify students at risk.

This is a self-reinforcing process. Our systems tell us a great deal about students who are struggling and much less about the conditions under which they are studying. And it is largely on the basis of these data that we develop and evaluate student success interventions.

The second, related, issue is where we tend to locate the problem. Much of our attention is focused on the student rather than on the environment in which they are studying: the institutional policies, practices, courses, and educational experiences that help shape their success.

When students struggle, we are likely to ask whether they are sufficiently motivated, adequately prepared, managing their time effectively, or making use of the support available to them. We are less likely to ask why successive groups of students struggle with the same course, why particular institutional processes create difficulties for students, or whether aspects of the educational experience we have designed are contributing to the problem. There is an important distinction here between being able to predict which students are likely to fail and understanding why they fail. We have become increasingly sophisticated at the former, but that doesn't necessarily bring us much closer to the latter.

There are important exceptions, particularly work focused on changing institutional practices and removing barriers to student progress. But much of student success still reflects these two tendencies: we focus on what is going wrong, and we tend to look for the explanation in the student.

Imagine instead an early alert system that flagged recurring difficulties at a particular point in a course, or when successive cohorts of students struggled with the same assessment. Imagine that it prompted us to examine the design of the course as well as to offer help to individual students. We would be asking a rather different set of questions.

Student success and instructional design have two different research traditions

And speaking of asking different questions, the people who study student success and those who study the design of learning experiences tend to approach their work in different ways.

There is a substantial literature in both fields and some overlap between them. But we might know that a particular approach to course design improves engagement, satisfaction, or even learning without knowing much about whether those improvements affect course completion, progression to subsequent courses, or persistence.

For student success professionals, this limits our understanding of how educational experiences contribute to the outcomes we measure. For instructional designers, it makes it difficult to demonstrate their contribution to outcomes that matter to institutional leaders. It is not that we necessarily need more research. We need research that connects the two traditions.

How we look inside courses

We study the ingredients rather than the cake

One of the things that strikes me about research on courses, as well as much of the advice we give faculty, is the extent to which we break courses down into their component parts.

Does the course contain videos? Do students watch them? Is there active learning? Are there discussion forums?

These are all sensible questions. But a course is no more a collection of its components than a cake is a collection of ingredients. How the components are combined, how they relate to one another, and what they are intended to accomplish matter enormously.

A discussion forum, for example, can be central to a carefully designed collaborative learning experience. It can also be a requirement to post twice and respond to three classmates with very little educational purpose. Knowing that both courses contain discussion forums tells us remarkably little about the similarities or differences in the learning experiences they provide.

There are good reasons for researchers to isolate individual variables, and some of that research, including the work on active learning I discussed in Part 1, is enormously valuable. But we also need to understand how the elements of a course work together. What constitutes an effective approach to course design? How do different approaches work for different kinds of students and in different disciplinary contexts?

We measure behavior without understanding the design behind it

Research on online learning and the use of learning analytics often focus on student behavior. Learning management systems (LMSs) have given us access to enormous quantities of behavioral data: how often students log in, how much time they spend interacting with resources, and how frequently they contribute to discussions.

These data can be useful indicators of engagement and of students encountering difficulties. But their interpretation depends heavily on the design of the course.

There is a further complication. Students' behavior is itself partly a product of the design of the course. A course might generate considerable LMS activity because it provides students with rich opportunities for interaction and learning. It might also generate considerable activity because students have difficulty finding what they need. We can learn a great deal from behavioral data, but we need to pay considerably more attention to the educational environments that generate those data.

The ways we study courses shape the evidence and advice available to institutions. And institutional practices can in turn reinforce a tendency to think about course quality in terms of the presence or absence of particular elements rather than the design of the learning experience as a whole.

How institutions manage courses

Course design too often becomes a compliance problem

One area in which institutions do pay considerable attention to course design is online learning, where numerous quality frameworks and rubrics have been developed to help faculty design and evaluate courses. These have considerable value, particularly for instructors moving to an unfamiliar mode of teaching.

But in practice, quality rubrics can too easily become an exercise in compliance. Does the course contain certain elements? Does it meet particular standards? Has it been through the quality review process? A quality rubric can establish a useful floor. It cannot substitute for thoughtful course design.

There is also a tendency, once a course has been through a quality review, to think of the design work as largely complete. We need to pay much more attention to what happens when students actually take the course and what we can learn from their experiences.

Course design is difficult institutional territory

Faculty autonomy and academic freedom are vitally important principles in higher education. But norms around course ownership can make it difficult to discuss course design as part of an institution's collective responsibility for student success.

An institution that identifies a required introductory course as a barrier to student progression might invest in tutoring, supplementary instruction, or more intensive advising. Examining and making changes to the design of the course may be a considerably more difficult undertaking.

The dynamics vary across institutions. Collaboratively designed courses or courses developed for multiple instructors may provide more opportunities for examining and improving their design, although there can still be considerable variation in how they are taught and experienced by students.

There is a difficult but important question here about how institutions can take greater collective responsibility for the educational experiences of their students while respecting the professional judgment and expertise of faculty.

Why this matters more than ever

Course design changes the range of problems institutions can address

Despite the attention and investment we have devoted to student success over the past decade or more, many institutions have struggled to make as much progress as they would have hoped.

I wonder whether part of the explanation lies in the kinds of problems we have become accustomed to trying to solve and the ways we have approached them.

For example, students frequently report difficulties managing the workload of their courses. Providing time-management coaching or helping students develop better study skills may be enormously helpful. But there are other dimensions to the problem. How clearly are expectations communicated? How much time do students spend trying to work out what they need to do or finding the resources they need? How are assessments and deadlines distributed? How well does the sequence of learning activities prepare students for more difficult assignments?

There are things we can change here through better course design. As the examples below suggest, bringing course design into the discussion expands the range of things institutions can do to improve student success. It also creates opportunities to address problems before students encounter them rather than relying as heavily on identifying and intervening with students who are already struggling. In this respect, good course design can be a form of student success intervention that doesn't depend on first identifying a student who needs help.

Online learning makes course design increasingly consequential

For fully online students, courses may constitute much of their experience of the institution. Their opportunities to interact with other students, ask questions, receive feedback, and develop a sense of belonging depend heavily on how their courses are designed.

Moving a course online requires considerably more than changing its mode of delivery. The same principles apply when course formats are accelerated by shortening terms and semesters, something a growing number of institutions are doing.

There are good reasons for institutions to explore shorter terms and eight-week courses, and some promising evidence of their effects on student success. But compressing a course into half the time creates a different set of challenges for students. How learning activities are sequenced, how workload is distributed, and how quickly students receive feedback become particularly important. The continuing growth of online learning and accelerated formats makes the neglect of course design in student success more consequential.

AI creates a need for substantial course redesign

I'm still not fully sure whether AI changes everything or whether it simply exposes the cracks or faults in higher education.

But either way, it creates a need to reconsider the design of assessments, learning activities, and the relationship between students and the work they produce. Much of the initial institutional response has focused on academic integrity and detecting inappropriate AI use. Many faculty will need considerable help with the more difficult work of redesigning their courses.

How do we ensure that students develop the knowledge and capabilities they need in a world in which AI is increasingly present? How do we avoid creating new barriers to success as we change the ways in which students learn and are assessed?

Much of the work involved in answering these questions will need to happen at the level of the course.

Making course design part of student success strategy

There are no magic bullets here. Making course design a more integral part of student success will require a shift in how institutions think about student success, as well as changes in how we study courses and the experiences of students. But there are some useful places to begin.

Make course design an explicit part of the strategy

One of the first things I would encourage institutions to do is to look at their existing student success strategy. What attention does it pay to the design of courses? When the institution identifies particular student success problems, how often does it consider changes to courses as a potential response?

I argued in Part 1 that it is useful to distinguish three locations in which institutions can influence student success: the support and services they provide to students, the curriculum and pathways through which students progress, and what happens inside courses.

A student success strategy should address all three.

Make examining the course part of how institutions respond to student success problems

Gateway courses, required courses with persistently high rates of D, F, and withdrawal grades, and courses that create significant barriers to student progression are sensible places to begin. A high D/F/W rate doesn't establish that there is something wrong with the design of a course. But it does suggest that the course warrants closer examination.

Where and when do students begin to struggle? Are there particular assessments, concepts, or activities with which students have difficulty? How is the work of the course distributed? What feedback do students receive, and what opportunities do they have to recover when they fall behind?

When a course is identified as a barrier to student progression, examining its design should be one of the options on the table rather than an afterthought.

Bring instructional designers more directly into student success work

There are considerable opportunities for instructional designers, faculty, student success professionals, and institutional researchers to work together in identifying student success problems, developing responses, and examining whether those responses improve students' experiences, learning, and progression.

Instructional designers bring particular expertise in how learning environments are designed and how the different elements of a course can work together to support learning. Faculty bring disciplinary knowledge and experience of teaching their students. Student success professionals and institutional researchers bring insights into the challenges students encounter and patterns in their experiences and outcomes.

I would particularly like to see instructional designers involved earlier in these discussions, when institutions are still trying to understand a student success problem and deciding how to address it.

Their contribution to student success extends considerably beyond helping implement a particular teaching practice or redesign a course once a decision has already been made.

Taking a place at the student success table

One of the things I find encouraging about bringing course design into student success is the prospect of expanding our repertoire of responses to the problems students encounter.

In my original presentation to the Canadian Association of Instructional Designers, I ended by encouraging instructional designers to take their place at the student success table. Having spent more time thinking about this for these two posts, I would extend that invitation to those of us working in student success.

We need to spend more time talking to the people who design courses, become more curious about what happens inside them, and broaden our understanding of the things institutions can do to improve student success.

After all, the courses students take are a kind of important part of what we do as colleges and universities.

The main On Student Success newsletter is free to share in part or in whole. All we ask is attribution.

Thanks for being a subscriber.