Important study on online and blended learning

Or: a challenge to one of Dartmouth's most treasured myths.

That myth is that the value that the institution provides is the face-to-face contact between faculty and student in the classrooms. That is Dartmouth's niche or trump card, to be played against schools like Yale, Harvard, MIT etc. If I had a quarter for everytime I've heard mention the idea of the "magic" that happens when a faculty member and student interact in the same room, I could have retired long ago.

The Department of Education commissioned SRI to to a comparative analysis of experiments that sought to compare learning outcomes for face-to-face courses vs. online or blended courses. Guess who won?

One key finding: "Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction." Holy cow.

Another key finding: "Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction."

Still another finding relating to time on task: "Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning."

And: "The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types."

That's just the beginning.  If nothing else, we should all read the exec summary and compare notes and reactions.

Download Online Learning Eval

Comments

[Joshua Kim]

Malcolm....took you up on your offer and downloaded/printed the exec summary.

Reading through made me wish for a mechanism that we could share this sort of evidenced based finding with faculty and administrator colleagues.

Our arguments for investments in resources and people to develop and teach courses in a hybrid manner, taking advantage of the CMS to complement the classroom worked, would be greatly strengthened by studies such as these.

[Brian Reid]

This is an interesting report.

I wonder about the uses of the term "face-to-face" in the Dartmouth "myth" versus its use in the Dept. of Ed. report. They seem somewhat different to me. Although not defined explicitly in the report, I assume it to use "face-to-face" to mean dealing with any course that meets with a physical presence. With this meaning I'm sure there are many "face-to-face" courses at Yale, Harvard, and MIT. In the Dartmouth "myth", I assume "face-to-face" means more direct contact with instructors, that Dartmouth does instructor-student interaction better. So the report doesn't seem to me to be a myth buster. It does suggest that to maintain an advantage, perhaps more attention could be given to online elements in courses. Dartmouth could do "blended" better and still hype instructor-student interaction.

Also, the conclusions in the study do go on to say

"Despite what appears to be strong support for online learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium, In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages. At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction."

If faculty put more thought and effort into teaching (including online activities), and students spend more time learning, good things may result.