Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Studies: Online Courses Unsuccessful at Community Colleges - the Hechinger Report

Online instruction at community colleges isn’t working. Yet policymakers are continuing to fund programs to expand online courses at these schools, which primarily serve low-income minority students, and community college administrators are planning to offer more and more of them. The latest salvo comes from researchers at the University of California—Davis, who found that community college students throughout California were 11 percent less likely to finish and pass a course if they opted to take the online version instead of the traditional face-to-face version of the same class. The still-unpublished paper, titled “Online Course-taking and Student Outcomes in California Community Colleges,” was presented on April 18, 2015, at the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference in Chicago. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/27/studies-online-courses-unsuccessful-at-community-colleges