Online college courses are replacing traditional classrooms at a crazy-fast pace, yet it is still unknown whether they are actually better for students. A new large-scale study of 40,000 community and technical college students finds that, compared to traditional courses, students in online courses receive worse grades and are more likely to drop out. The negative impact of online study is disturbingly pronounced for minorities and students already at risk of dropping out.
“Overall, the online format had a significantly negative relationship with both course persistence and course grade, indicating that the typical student had difficulty adapting to online courses,” writes Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars of Columbia University. “Specifically, we found that males, black students, and students with lower levels of academic preparation experienced significantly stronger negative coefficients for
online learning compared with their counterparts, in terms of both course persistence and course grades.”
The research team controlled for an impressive array of student characteristics, class types and demographics, and found a negative impact across most of their variables. Interestingly, they also looked at courses where more than 75 percent of the students were at risk, and found that the presence of at-risk peers made drop out all the more likely.
The impact, or “effect size” as it’s called in statistics, was very large. Taking a course online correlated with a grade drop of between 0.15-0.4 on average out of a 4.0 scale.
The study, however, should be taken in context. As I’ve written before, large-scale research by the department of education finds that online education is often better than traditional face-to-face instruction.
We don’t yet know how massively open online courses (MOOCs) will affect students as they scale to the wider population. This new study from Columbia is an important part (but only a part) of the ongoing national experiment.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Top Reads
-
The Resonance's Scholarship and Talent Reward Test (STaRT-2012), which was open to students from classes VI to XII across India, was de...
-
The Maharashtra State Board for Secondary and Higher Secondary Education will declare HSC results for the year 2012 on Friday, May 25 at ...
-
SSC students in the city may find it tough to fend off the challenge from other boards during junior college admissions as barely 2.5% of st...
-
Schools are more than just temples of learning. They are also an overactive arena for both physical and mental injuries. A unique attempt to...
-
Haryana School Shiksha Pariyojna Parishad, under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, will provide training in self-defence and other martial arts to ...
-
OBC students came up trumps in the UP Board class X exams with two of the three toppers coming from the socially backward category. Securing...
-
The results of Maharashtra's last MBA entrance exam conducted by Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) on March 11 are out and ove...
-
In Conversation with Mark Taylor, dean, Warwick Business School on importance of interdisciplinary learning in management education ...
-
Colleges of Delhi University played safe as they announced an inflated cutoff list late night on Monday. The first of the five cutoff lists ...
-
In the lines of Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the Board of Secondary Examination, Assam (SEBA) has also decided to change the...
Blog Archive
-
▼
2013
(31)
-
▼
February
(11)
- Study: Online Courses May Be The Worst For Minorit...
- By April-end, 27% building in IIT-B will be solar ...
- EduTalk Turns 1
- This school teaches students how to fail
- India outclasses US in GMAT scores
- TIPS to beat EXAM Stress
- Exam blues are here
- Is Right to Education Act applicable to nursery ad...
- Question bank for NEET, JEE now on website
- SSC internal assessment in Maharashtra to be reduc...
- All except 160 institutions come under RTE: Govt
-
▼
February
(11)
No comments:
Post a Comment