Online training: sustainability in the face of unskilled, unsupervised, unmotivated 'long tail'

Communities of discourse and market places often follow power laws with 'long tailed' distributions. The present student 'voucher' system and uncapped demand in higher education leads to an analogous 'long tail' in the tertiary sector. We argue that student attrition in the “long tail” is part of a natural democratic process of “churn” -legitimate peripheral participation which leads some students to the realisation that they are not sufficiently motivated or prepared for fuller participation in the academic community. We illustrate this idea with data from a task in an introductory psychology program to examine the relationship between persistence, performance, motivation and demographics. We found distinct subgroups whose performance is defined by levels of conscientiousness/motivation and initial skill. We suggest that it may be counterproductive to retain students who perform poorly or are disengaged. However, we also identified different patterns of performance and suggest that attrition can be attenuated by targeted interventions to improve initial performance of identified groups.