Online Learning

This week, I would like to share a 2015 paper, by Joseph Cavanaugh entitled, A Large Sample Comparison of Grade Based Student Learning Outcomes in Online vs. Face-to-Face Courses. Overall, online education is largely viewed by people with a background in education as being equivalent to instruction conducted face-to-face.

The research includes over 5,000 courses taught by over 100 faculty over a period of five years at a large, public university. Multiple regression was used to account for factors known to bias course format selection and grade based outcomes to generate a test for differences in grade based learning outcomes that could be attributed to course format. The final model identified a statistical difference between course formats that translated into a negligible difference (Bernard et al., 2004; Zhao et al., 2005; Tallent-Runnels et al., 2006; Means et al., 2009).

Through this research, along with other meta-studies on the comparison of online versus face-to-face learning, the outcomes have been shown to produce no significant difference in these modalities. The results have been added to the “No Significant Differences.ORG website”.