Dropout in distance education: factors associated with choice of modality as the dropout conditions

Abstract

The university distance education emerges as a palliative of inequality of opportunities   overcoming exclusion from access or as a second chance to avoid collage dropouts in traditional face to face programs. The study of the causes of college dropout has been developed from a basic set of theoretical explanatory models, predominantly applied to face to face programs. This work aims to particularly describe the factors that produce dropouts in distance education. This paper summarizes the main theoretical aspects related to college dropout in distance education in order to guide subsequent empirical approaches where the relative importance of each factor is applied to individual cases Among the factors associated with college dropout at distance education are of singular interest those aspects that this model attempts to mitigate in the traditional face to face models.