New article on online education
Online courses have become very popular – and very controversial – for many reasons. In the fall of 2014 there were 5.8 million students taking online courses, with 2.85 million taking all of their courses online. Originally being offered by for-profit institutions, now a number of public colleges and universities are offering them under a number of premises, such as making higher education more accessible, the belief that offering on-line courses is cheaper than in person and that they provide an easier way to learn.
Yet, it has been the common wisdom that students consistently perform worse in an online setting than they do in face-to-face classrooms and that taking online courses increases their likelihood of dropping out and overall impedes their progress through college. So has online education fulfilled its original promises?
In a study published last June by the Brookings Institute (a non-partisan think-tank based in Washington, D.C.), the authors concluded that online higher education is a mixed bag. The study, titled “Promises and pitfalls of online education,” the researchers found, among other things, that “in their current design, online courses are difficult, especially for the students who are least prepared. These students’ learning and persistence outcomes are worse when they take online courses than they would have been had these same students taken in-person courses.” Yet, they believe that “continued improvement of online curricula and instruction can strengthen the quality of these courses and hence the educational opportunities for the most in-need populations.”
One basic problem in the design of online courses is that their creators assume that all students have the same preparation and skills and will all succeed just by putting in enough time and effort. However, we all know that every student is different. Further, those who are first-generation college students, those who live in rural areas, or who come from deficient high schools usually do worse than students coming from more advantageous backgrounds.
To try to clarify these issues, the researchers used data from DeVry University, a for-profit college with an undergraduate enrollment of more than 100,000 students nationwide. DeVry’s students, on average, take two-thirds of their courses online, which means that they could make meaningful comparisons with the rest of their students who take courses in conventional in-person classes. Further, their online and in-person sections are identical in most ways with many professors teaching both versions.
Some of the results of their research were that taking a course online reduces student grades by 0.44 points on the traditional four-point grading scale. Students taking the course in-person earned roughly a B- grade on average, while those taking it online earned a C, providing evidence that students learned less in the online setting.
They also found that taking a course online increases the probability that a student will drop out of school by 9 percent. As expected, the negative effects of online courses are concentrated in the lowest performing students. Low performing students who take online classes have grades reduced by 0.5 points or more, while students with prior higher GPAs showed a much smaller effect on their grades. Thus, “while online courses may have the potential to differentiate coursework to meet the needs of students with weaker incoming skills, current online courses, in fact, do an even worse job of meeting the needs of these students than do traditional in-person courses,” according to the study.
The general conclusion of the study was that “students in online courses perform substantially worse than students in traditional in-person courses and that experience in these online courses impact performance in future classes and their likelihood of dropping out of college.” These findings are consistent with prior studies of online education in other settings, such as community colleges and highly competitive four-year institutions that also showed that online courses yield worse average outcomes than in-person courses.
Despite these numbers, online courses continue to be an alternative to some students who, because of personal circumstances, have no other choices. Yet, most of the students enrolled in these kinds of courses attend for-profit institutions, which are non-selective and typically serve students with weaker academic preparation and fewer economic resources than students who attend more selective colleges and universities.
Is there a better way to offer these courses? The authors of this study think so. They believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can adapt course material better to the needs of a diverse group of students, since these systems assess students’ current weaknesses, but also diagnose why students make specific errors. Nonetheless, “the tremendous scale and consistently negative effects of current offerings points to the need to improve these courses, particularly for students most at risk of course failure and college dropout,” conclude the authors.
In other words, online courses should not be designed to just mirror the in-person experience, but should use the latest technology to make them more flexible and adaptable to the specific students’ needs. The only problem with this conclusion is that the application of advanced technologies such as AI increases the cost of delivery of online education. And who is going to pay for that? After all, the application of AI to education requires expert personnel, time and effort, which all that costs money.
This certainly challenges the conventional wisdom that online education will always be cheaper since economics seems to be the real reason why for-profit private institutions and public ones with diminishing state support are offering online courses.
Sooner or later policy makers, college administrators, and the general public will have to face the reality that quality education, just as healthcare or good infrastructure, costs money and that there is no technological fix to that.
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Online Education is Faulty and Needs Reform