Because of the increasing demand for a greater proportion of the population to have a post-secondary education, educational institutions are looking for ways to provide this using methods that are economical and scalable. Online education appears to meet that need and has become strategic for many institutions of higher education, especially community colleges. These colleges often serve populations who are not traditional college students, and these students are often at greater risk of attrition from classes. Therefore, understanding theoretical forces that affect student persistence is important to guide policy decisions in all aspects of administration, design, and teaching of these classes. Previous studies showed strong connections between the theoretical constructs of self-efficacy, usability, and social presence and its correlation to student persistence in online classes. However, massive and rapid changes in technology acceptance, internet accessibility and student expectations call for a need to reexamine these constructs to see if indeed these are still key factors in student persistence. The online writing and English classes (N=706) of a large urban community college were invited to participate in a survey and the completed surveys (N=49) were analyzed to look for correlations between self-efficacy in online education, usability of the Learning Management System (both overall usability and the instructor's utilization of the platform), and social presence (of both the instructor and peers) in students who persisted in the classes (N=43) and those who dropped (N=6). Demographic data was also examined. Little difference was found between persisters and non-persisters in all of the constructs studied, which was in contrast to previous research. Qualitative analysis of comments found high frustration levels in all three areas, even among students who were persisting. The decision to drop or persist appears to be closely tied to strategic choices made by the students.
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