Online courses, offered by great universities, community colleges, and even several charter schools and high schools, don’t appear to be delivering education to the massive throngs educators once thought would benefit from the infusion of technology, a new report from Teachers College at Columbia University suggests.
Analyzing nearly 500,000 courses taken by over 40,000 community and technical college students in Washington State, the study published earlier this month examines how well students adapt to the online environment in terms of their ability to persist and earn strong grades in online courses relative to their ability to do so in face-to-face courses.
The results are less than promising. While all types of students in the study suffered decrements in performance in online courses, some struggled more than others: males, younger students, black students, and students with lower grade point averages. This could mean that if students are required to take courses online, black students, who already don’t perform as well as white students on standardized tests, may lose even more ground as a result of their response differential to online courses.
The Community College Research Center has conducted at least eight investigations since 2005, most of which came in the last three years, to study the rapid growth of online courses. They have reached a few conclusions:
- Many students drop out of online courses.
- Online courses put students with less motivation at a disadvantage.
- They favor students with more technology experience, regardless of the course subject.
- Online courses in middle and high school may widen certain achievement gaps
Student attrition
In some cases, as many as 95 percent of students drop out of online courses. For example, the first massive open online course (MOOC) offered by MIT last year was a course entitled “Circuits and Electronics.” It was free and open to anyone, and there were no admission requirements. It brought 155,000 online students who came from 160 countries. But only about 7,000 passed the course (PDF).
When asked about the dropout rate higher than 95 percent, Anant Agrawal, who leads the MOOC program at MIT, pointed out that more students passed the course than had passed it on campus in the last 40 years. So, while the dropout “rate” looks bad, a huge number of people are still passing courses taught by some of the nation’s greatest professors.
But not all online courses are free, which means a great many students are paying tuition, dropping out, and getting nothing for their money.
If the course is a requirement for high school graduation or even advancement from eighth grade, though, there’s a lot more to worry about. In middle school especially, when students are going through the social transition from childhood to adulthood, the education they get is particularly important. Technology, including the online course, offers the possibility of meeting students’ individual needs much better, especially if the courses use flexible timelines and there is a high level of interaction among students and teachers.
The competence-confidence distinction
Blended courses—those that use online components while still putting kids in desks with a teacher present—tend to work better than either traditional lectures or online-only classes, several studies have found (see here and here, for example), though the reasons are still poorly understood. Online-only courses work better for students who are comfortable with the technology, confident in their teacher’s and their own ability to use the technology, and at least somewhat competent in the course material.
This means online courses don’t work as well for low-performing students, typically identified as “at risk” students. These students need more encouragement and engagement from teachers, stuff the cold, distant online environment can’t provide. It may be helpful, some researchers think, to have students demonstrate success in a traditional course at the level of the online course offerings before enrolling in online-only courses. This is especially valuable, research suggests, for remedial students.
But hope is not lost. If students are motivated and have some skill with the online environment and some competence in the course material, online courses seem to work fairly well and respond to several current trends in education, such as distance learning—i.e., teachers who have students at several different schools—and part-time teachers in some subjects. For example, a recent study in Taiwan found that low-achieving students who took an online course in computing skills retained their knowledge of the course material three years later more than students who received traditional lectures in the subject.
