eCelebrations: Virtual Graduations to Celebrate Online Students
Online students are often short-changed when they reach their most important milestone—graduation. For many institutions, virtual graduation has proven to be a holy grail of sorts—critically important to student experience, but illusive in form and difficult to achieve. This article explores several existing models of virtual graduations, and proposes a framework to evaluate the quality of synchronous virtual graduation events.
We also present an example of a synchronous virtual graduation celebration in a master’s degree program that optimizes social presence and engagement. This robust event features real-time audio and webcam participation by all participants, keynote speakers, interactive prize contests, and personalized announcement of graduates. By illuminating the logistics, we enable other universities to consider adoption of this powerful innovation to enhance the online learning experience and further engage online learners.
