Recent
research published by the Community College Research Center (CCRC) found that, compared to traditional classes, students tended to perform worse academically in online classes — suggesting that students had “difficulty adapting” to online learning. Perhaps even more startling, students of color and men fared the worst.
“Specifically, we found that males, Black students, and students with lower levels of academic preparation experienced significantly stronger negative coefficients for online learning compared with their counterparts, in terms of both course persistence and course grade,” authors Di Xu and Shanna Jaggars, who looked at the data from 40,000 community college students in Washington state, wrote in the report. “This is troubling from an equity perspective: If this pattern holds true across other states and educational sectors, it would imply that the continued expansion of online learning could strengthen, rather than ameliorate, educational inequity.”
Online learning has been hailed as the savior, or possibly the demise, of higher education as we know it.
The New York Times labeled 2012 the “
year of the MOOC” or the massive open online courses. The idea is that high-quality research institutions like Harvard, MIT or Stanford can push out their courses to folks across the Internet, giving them access to learning previously barricaded by university walls and high-priced tuition. But this new research indicates
