It was splendid to see most (Wesley, I'm looking at you!) of you last night. Since teaching is so much on our minds at the moment, I thought I'd share this Chronicle article about the progress and pitfalls of online courses at the community college level.
According to Rob Jenkins, a professor of English at a Georgia community college, the demand for higher completion rates for state and nationally funded colleges, has led to a push for more online courses. Online courses mean more options for folks who are fitting in school between jobs, or who have a hard time getting to campus, which, the received wisdom suggests, should increase completion. Jenkins disputes this claim, though, with a fairly compelling argument:
In any class, using as many different means of delivering ideas and content as possible increases your chances of reaching students with different needs, resources, and learning styles. As we consider how to incorporate technology into our classes--or our classes into technology--we should make sure that we're opening up ways for students to access ideas, and persist with their studies, rather than closing them down. I believe that there are useful ways of taking our teaching online--but I also believe that it requires a careful consideration of the possibilities and limitations of our present technology--and the strength of the human connection that can come from face-to-face instruction.... online enthusiasts point to a 2009 "meta-analysis" by the U.S. Department of Education that, they say, shows that online courses are not only cheaper and more convenient but also better. The report looked at 99 individual studies of online learning conducted since 1996 and concluded that "on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction."
Nice try. But that study has serious flaws, especially as it pertains to community colleges. In the "Effectiveness of Fully Online Courses for College Students: Response to a Department of Education Meta-Analysis," Shanna Smith Jaggers and Thomas Bailey of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University point out that only 28 of the 99 studies examined in the Education Department report focused on courses that were fully online. Furthermore, only seven looked at semester-long courses, as opposed to short-term online programs on narrow topics, "such as how to use an Internet search engine."...
Even more alarming, for those of us on the front lines at community colleges, is the fact that all seven of those studies were conducted at midsize or large universities, five of which were rated as "selective" or "highly selective" by U.S. News & World Report. Those are not exactly the kinds of places that typically attract at-risk students—the ones least likely to complete their degrees. Community colleges do attract such students, and in large numbers.
Moreover, in six of the seven studies, withdrawal rates were not even mentioned, meaning that the research gauged only how well students performed after completing the course. The studies didn't tell us anything about those students who didn't complete the course.
Two other studies by researchers at Columbia's Community College Research Center do shed light on the role that online courses play in college completion—and the news isn't exactly good.
The more recent of the two, as reported by The Chronicle in July 2011, "followed the enrollment history of 51,000 community-college students in Washington state between 2004 and 2009 [and] found an eight percentage-point gap in completion rates between traditional and online courses." That comes on the heels of a 2010 study that reached similar conclusions about community-college students in Virginia: "Regardless of their initial level of preparation ... students were more likely to fail or withdraw from online courses than from face-to-face courses. In addition, students who took online coursework in early semesters were slightly less likely to return to school in subsequent semesters, and students who took a higher proportion of credits online were slightly less likely to attain an educational award or transfer to a four-year institution." [for the full article, please visit the Chronicle of Higher Education and look for the article "Online Classes and College Completion"
What I am hearing from various quarters is that significant increase in online programs will 1) make higher education cheaper; 2) provide our college with much needed revenue; 3) provide access to higher education for people who cannot come to face-to-face courses. There seems to be less tolerance for questioning its efficacy, even in the form of evidence-based research. And there seems to be fevered gushing about flipping the classroom, which I think means attending a lecture at a different time of day.
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