This research intended to determine the causes why students enrolled in online courses during the period from January to June 2014 dropped out, analyzing the different factors that influence academic attrition of students enrolled in complementary online courses at Centro de Comercio y Servicios SENA Risaralda. Due to high dropout rate in the online training-mode, different variables were investigated such as personal, economic and social, that do not allow to the student to continue with his/her online training. The research was structured from various chapters which include a description of the study,a theoretical and conceptual foundation to support the stated problem, a strategy that shows the how, the when and the who of the study, defining the techniques and instruments of data collection, another chapter where the results were described, and the last one, where the conclusions derived from the data obtained were presented. The research was based on a case-study, which focuses on explaining why a phenomenon occurs and under what conditions this occurs.