“More and more U.S. post-secondary institutions are measuring, and seeking to improve, rates of student retention and success. Unfortunately, most of the measures and initiatives in use are grounded in the ‘traditional’ model of post-secondary education, in which young, largely full-time students attend face-to-face classes on campus. Students who pursue courses and programs online, however, tend to have different demographic and educational characteristics, and the institutions that serve them need different measures of, and initiatives to improve, their retention and success.”
Dr. Mark L. Parker is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Director of Professional Writing and of Philosophy, School of Undergraduate Studies, University of Maryland University College. He is responsible for the university's business writing, technical writing, and philosophy courses, including the course content, methods of assessment, and student retention and success. He supervises two teaching cadres totaling more than 150 full- and part-time faculty. Prior to joining the School of Undergraduate Studies Dr. Parker was UMUC's Assistant Provost for Academic Affairs. He has represented UMUC in organizations such as the European Distance Education Network (EDEN), the International Council on Open and Distance Education (ICDE), the Sloan Consortium's Asynchronous Learning Network, and the U.S. Department of Defense's Distance Education Task Force. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Florida State University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His areas of research interest include intercultural communication; factors affecting online/Web-based communication; English as a second/foreign language; and the interface between visual and verbal literacies.
He has written and presented extensively on such topics as online student retention and the use of technology in adult and continuing higher education; in 2010 he received the University Continuing Education Association’s William Rainey Harper Research Award for outstanding contribution to the literature in distance and continuing education. He is the past president of the University of Maryland chapter of the honor society Phi Kappa Phi, and a lifetime member of the society. A veteran of the U.S. Air Force, Dr. Parker has almost 20 years of experience in higher education administration and teaching. Prior to joining UMUC he worked at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Since January 2011 he has also been serving as the interim Assistant Dean for Communication, Arts, & Humanities in the School of Undergraduate Studies at UMUC, in which capacity he oversees seven bachelor’s degree programs, a cadre of more than 800 full- and part-time faculty, and annual enrollments of nearly 30,000 of which 80% are fully online.
