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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2/19/2013 6:26 AM, Art Deco wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CAB8VJX6uddo_KUZQWOLujoNhqC1jyaZbqjZOzzTQ94pAr-o1jQ@mail.gmail.com"
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<div class=""> <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/"><img moz-do-not-send="true"
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alt="The New York Times" align="left" border="0"
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<div class="">February 18, 2013</div>
<h1>The Trouble With Online College</h1>
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<p>
Stanford University ratcheted up interest in online
education when a pair of celebrity professors attracted more
than 150,000 students from around the world to a noncredit,
open enrollment course on artificial intelligence. This
development, though, says very little about what role online
courses could have as part of standard college instruction.
College administrators who dream of emulating this strategy
for classes like freshman English would be irresponsible not
to consider two serious issues. </p>
<p>
First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some
huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in
small-scale online courses when compared with traditional
face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely
online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated
people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students
who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and
who need close contact with instructors to succeed. </p>
<p>
Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the
whole, the record is not encouraging. According to Columbia
University’s Community College Research Center, for example,
about seven million students — about a third of all those
enrolled in college — are enrolled in what the center
describes as traditional online courses. These typically
have about 25 students and are run by professors who often
have little interaction with students. Over all, the center
has produced nine studies covering hundreds of thousands of
classes in two states, Washington and Virginia. The picture
the studies offer of the online revolution is distressing. </p>
<p>
The research has shown over and over again that community
college students who enroll in online courses are
significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in
traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned
tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still,
low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in
traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in
online courses. </p>
<p>
A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students
enrolled in Washington State community and technical
colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of
online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer
to four-year colleges. The reasons for such failures are
well known. Many students, for example, show up at college
(or junior college) unprepared to learn, unable to manage
time and having failed to master basics like math and
English. </p>
<p>
Lacking confidence as well as competence, these students
need engagement with their teachers to feel comfortable and
to succeed. What they often get online is estrangement from
the instructor who rarely can get to know them directly.
Colleges need to improve online courses before they deploy
them widely. Moreover, schools with high numbers of students
needing remedial education should consider requiring at
least some students to demonstrate success in traditional
classes before allowing them to take online courses. </p>
<p>
Interestingly, the center found that students in hybrid
classes — those that blended online instruction with a
face-to-face component — performed as well academically as
those in traditional classes. But hybrid courses are rare,
and teaching professors how to manage them is costly and
time-consuming. </p>
<p>
The online revolution offers intriguing opportunities for
broadening access to education. But, so far, the evidence
shows that poorly designed courses can seriously shortchange
the most vulnerable students. </p>
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This interesting and unsurprising, not to mention unsigned, article
does not mention any relation between student age and course
persistence or performance. If the situation is as bad as reported
for post-secondary school aged students, one might surmise that the
reported problems might be worse among younger, high-school age
students if one considers only those students' interaction with the
curriculum per se. Whether concurrent high school attendance while
living with parents would favorably impact high school students'
success rates in on-line courses is speculative, though one would
like to think that simultaneous parent and teacher knowledge of
on-line course enrollment would be favorably motivating for
students. Notwithstanding that, the article does not portend well
for success of the policies Idaho senior educational leadership
continues to attempt, disrespectfully of voters' wishes, to foist
upon the public.<br>
<br>
<br>
Ken<br>
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