Some very interesting reading this week. I will begin by expressing my thoughts about the U.S. Department of Education review of research on the effectiveness of on-line learning as compared to face-to-face courses. I am, frankly, surprised by the results of that review. It has long been my expressed opinion that teaching someone in person is the best way to teach someone. The teacher gets to know the student and then makes necessary adjustments to the curriculum to match the student's needs. On-line courses only become a better option when, for whatever reasons, some of which we will get to later, students cannot access a face-to-face setting. The job of on-line courses, then, is to try to be almost as good as face-to-face classes. Not better. Almost as good. The U.S. Department of Education report says that I am wrong. Me. Wrong. I have difficulty accepting that outcome and I am not ready to acquiesce to it.
Let's start from the beginning. From the report: "The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction." (p. ix) That is a pretty clear statement. To be accurate, the report established that these results were true in higher education settings and could not, due to a lack of data, be applied to students in K-12 settings where I exist. So that's one thing. I can still claim that face-to-face classes are better in high school. No one has knocked me off that perch, yet. Another notion from the report is also puzzling to me. The authors found that blended courses are the best of the bunch. It seems strange to me that, if adding face-to-face time to online courses makes them better, going to all face-to-face would have a negative effect.
Another area of concern for me is that the reports says that students "performed better". What, exactly, does that mean? Does that mean that they learned the material better? Does it mean that they got better grades? Does it means that they self-assessed and claimed to have performed better? I combed through the document and could find no indication of how performance was measured. In fact, one of the caveats of the report is that "many of the studies suffered from weaknesses such as . . . potential bias stemming from the authors' dual role as experimenters and instructors." (p. xvii) The possibility exists, therefore, that the results of the some of the studies were tainted due to grade inflation because the instructor wanted the online version of the course to appear better.
So, with all of those doubts, I am prepared to stick to my guns and say that online learning is a wonderful and viable option, sometimes the only option, but it is not yet better than sitting down with your teacher and learning from her.
The other piece of interesting reading was the Killion et al. article Are Virtual Classrooms Colorblind?. This article brought up some very important issues for me. When I design my classroom environment, are my "on-line learning materials . . . developed primarily from an Aglo-Saxon perspective" (p. 4)? I never considered that question. I understand that, by the very nature of a course being presented online, I risk alienating a sector of the population that cannot afford internet access, but I have not considered the nationality or race of my student population as of yet. The idea that "Interface design elements may elicit a range of responses from different cultures related to format ( e.g. colors, icons, sounds), navigation through content, and communication channels" (p. 5) is entirely fascinating to me. I now have new considerations in the design phase of my work.
Bryan, I too wondered about the measurement at which students "performed better" according to the Means article, but my first thought was not that this better performance would be reflected in higher grades. After all aren't you a little skeptical of a course in which everyone receives high grades? It does not necessarily imply universal success. I went back to the Stanford Criteria for Assessments from a few weeks ago, to see if there was overlap between that study and the findings of this Dept. of Ed article, and the first Stanford criteria that jumped out at me was that assessments should be free from bias. I would have to think that, though the instruction may be biased because of the instructor's duel roles, the assessments were very likely created well before the bias would have come into play. In other words, I found this to be pretty convincing evidence of the efficacy of online / blended learning. But as you point out, this is only addressing college level - I would love to see the results of the same study K-12.
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