“Students with non-high-speed connections will not experience a seamless video feed, but lectures will be choppy [and] annoying to watch,” said Greenhow. “Students who don’t own their own internet-connected computer or laptop will experience more hurdles getting online, and watching lectures on small, portable handheld devices [is] a decidedly different experience than on a good-size screen with high-quality audio and visuals.”
Greenhow added that the average test-score gap between groups that fared worse in the NBER study and their peers was “slightly statistically significant but not practically significant.”
Still, it’s something to consider as educators prepare courses for online delivery.
The NBER study, conducted during the spring 2007 semester, showed small variations in overall test scores for online students and live-learning students.
Classroom students scored an average of 84.5 percent on the first exam in the microeconomics course, and online students scored 83.3 percent on average. Online students outscored their classroom-based peers by three-tenths of a percentage on the second exam, and classroom students scored about 1.5 percentage points higher than web-based students on the final exam.
NBER researchers wrote that in 2006, “public four-year colleges and universities relied on tuition for over 37 percent of their total revenues for the first time in modern history, and the recent financial crisis has surely further increased the fiscal constraints faced by public and private universities alike.”
The Instructional Technology Council conducted a study that showed distance learning enrollment in American community colleges jumped by 22 percent during the 2008-09 academic year, which followed an 11-percent increase from the 2007-08 school year.
The survey also highlighted the closing gap in course completion rates among online learners, which traditionally has lagged behind that of traditional face-to-face students.
Seventy-two percent of web-based community college students completed their class last year, compared with 76 percent of on-campus students.
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