Not A Positive Trend

From the Harvard Business Review:

December 26, 2013

Students Get Lower Grades in Online Courses

Although students who take online courses in community colleges tend to be better prepared and more motivated than their classmates, a study by Di Xu and Shanna Smith Jaggars of Columbia University shows that the online format has a significant negative impact on students’ persistence in sticking with courses and on their course grades. For the typical student, taking a course online rather than in person would decrease his or her likelihood of course persistence by 7 percentage points, and if the student continued to the end of the course, would lower his or her final grade by more than 0.3 points on a 4-point scale. Before expanding online courses, colleges need to improve students’ time-management and independent-learning skills, the researchers say.

SOURCE: The impact of online learning on students’ course outcomes: Evidence from a large community and technical college system

Personally I have never been a fan of online or even remote classrooms.  I first encountered this concept back in the early 80's taking some Master level Computer Science classes thru the U of Minn remote hooked that IBM supplied.  That never really worked for me.

Blogging and online forums do have their place, obviously ☺.  However, when I went for my MBA a few years ago, to me there was no compromising on having classroom instruction.  The level of discussion in a classroom cannot compare at all to that which occurs in an online discussion.  I also have made friends and professional contacts that would be much harder to accomplish online.

Of course, with this study good to see that I also achieved much more than online as well ...