Tag: education

Is online education as good as traditional, face-to-face education?

. . . Since a Department of Education meta-analysis last summer concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction,” many advocates now consider the matter closed.

Not so fast, say researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Education Department’s study was deeply flawed and its implications have been overblown, say the authors of a working paper released this month by the bureau.

“None of the studies cited in the widely-publicized meta-analysis released by the U.S. Department of Education included randomly-assigned students taking a full-term course, with live versus online delivery mechanisms, in settings that could be directly compared (i.e., similar instructional materials delivered by the same instructor),” they write. “The evidence base on the relative benefits of live versus online education is therefore tenuous at best.”

In spring 2007, they randomly assigned 327 volunteers enrolled in an introductory microeconomics course to either attend the class lectures live or watch them online. Both groups would have access to the same ancillary materials and access to office hours and graduate assistants; the only difference would be the mode of lecture delivery.

They found no statistically significant differences between the academic performances of the two groups generally. However, they did find that Hispanic students, male students, and low-achieving students in the online group fared significantly worse than their counterparts in the live-attendance group.

These findings do not exactly refute the conclusions of the Education Department’s meta-analysis. Nor is the new study without flaws of its own, which the authors enumerate in detail — though not the most obvious, which is that videotaped lectures are a relatively primitive form of online teaching, and, where they are used, are usually only part of the package.

But Rush says the main takeaway of the bureau’s experiment is not that he and his co-authors are right or that the Education Department’s study was wrong; just that there is much more work — much more precise work — to be done before any firm pronouncements can be made on the merits of online education relative to the face-to-face kind.

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Blackboard announced today the release of a new version of its widely used e-learning suite, with an emphasis on incorporating social networking tools such as wikis, YouTube, Flickr, and Slideshare. “We provided a very intuitive process to search for and add content from YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare to a course without ever having to leave the LMS,” said Stacey Fontenot, a Blackboard vice president, in an e-mail. “And this content can be leveraged not only as stand-alone course content but used in different places like discussion-board posts and assessment questions to provide educators with more dynamic ways to engage and assess learners.” Version 9.1 also has tools that will help better organize and evaluate student contributions to course wikis, Fontenot said. Certain parts of the new version were designed “with WebCT clients in mind,” she added, as part of an effort to “create a familiar environment” for those campuses that used WebCT for their learning-management needs before Blackboard bought the competitor in 2005.

Since the online-education boom, the notion that students could cobble together a curriculum that includes courses designed and delivered by a variety of different institutions — including for-profit ones — has gained traction in some circles.

Much of the talk about this imminent unbundling has come from colleges that predict that students might want to transfer credits from other colleges that might have different missions. But the competition may also come from entities that do not even offer degrees.

Consider Statistics.com, a company that teaches a swath of online statistics courses to mostly adult learners. In eight years, Statistics.com has grown its menu from a half-dozen professional-development classes to more than 80 courses designed and administered by top statisticians, many of them professors at leading universities. It enrolls about 2,500 students per year. And although the company caters primarily to the professional-development crowd, Statistics.com says it is now looking to grow its introductory offerings in a way that could compete with “any university, whether online or brick-and-mortar, that is going after the nontraditional student market,” according to Peter Bruce, its founder and president.

“Organizations that provide the ‘best’ online education in a given subject area will come to dominate others,” he says. In other words, as technology allows students to pick and choose courses from different institutions, the education providers that thrive will be those that concentrate their resources in particular fields.

Skeptics who object to counting credits from courses taken through commercial providers toward degrees at a traditional institution usually do so based on concerns about quality and rigor. But Michelle Everson, a lecturer at the University of Minnesota who also serves as a consultant and an instructor for Statistics.com, says there is, pound for pound, no difference in rigor between Statistics.com’s introductory courses and the ones Minnesota offers as part of its curriculum. She teaches both.

Burck Smith, the founder and CEO of StraighterLine, says that, while the precepts of higher education are difficult to change, he believes the confluence of several economic factors — particularly rising tuition and the unwillingness of many students to take on exorbitant debt, especially as they see their degree-holding peers struggling to land jobs — may force institutions to consider turning to outside specialists if they want to continue offering certain courses.

And if they don’t, Smith says, students will likely turn to the outside specialists themselves.

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A growing body of research has all but obliterated the notion that distance education is inherently less effective than classroom education. But even the most ardent distance-ed evangelists cannot deny persistent evidence suggesting that students are more likely to drop out of online programs than traditional ones. The phenomenon has many explanations, not least the fact that what often makes students choose the flexibility of online learning — being too busy to enroll in a classroom course — can also make it harder for them to keep up with their studies.

But Douglas E. Hersh, dean of educational programs and technology at Santa Barbara City College, believes there is another major factor driving the gap between retention rates in face-to-face programs and those in the rapidly growing world of distance education: the lack of a human touch.

And unlike the reality of adult students’ busy lives, Hersh says the human-touch problem can be solved. In fact, he thinks he knows how.

Hersh’s solution is to incorporate more video and audio components into the course-delivery mechanism. Most professors who teach online already incorporate short video and audio clips into their courses, according to a 2009 by the Campus Computing Project. But it is rarer, Hersh says, for professors to use video of themselves to teach or interact with their online students — largely because the purveyors of major learning management systems do not orient their platforms to feature that method of delivery.

That is why Hersh convinced Santa Barbara in 2008 to abandon Blackboard, the LMS industry leader, in favor of Moodle’s open-source platform, which he used to build the straightforwardly named “Human Presence Learning Environment.” The interface is designed so that professors can deliver lessons and messages using videos recorded with a Webcam. It also shows students who among their instructors or classmates are logged into Skype, the video-chat service, in case they want to have a live, face-to-face conversation. As an alternative to text, students using computers that have built-in recording equipment can post audio responses to discussion threads.

. . . For Hersh, engagement goes hand-in-hand with audio-visual communication. The more that exchanges occurring within an online learning environment resemble those that occur in classrooms, he says, the more that students will feel connected to their professors and classmates, and the more likely they will be to stay in a program.

. . . Hersh admits that this return to the emotional dynamics of face-to-face learning may come at a cost: The text-based medium that currently dominates online learning environments may eliminate the prejudices and distractions inherent to visual communication, making conversations in text-based learning environments more focused.

But communicating solely via text is also alienating, says Hersh. Weighing the theoretical advantages of purely textual discourse against the demonstrated engagement benefits of presence-oriented teaching, the latter wins, he says.

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