Test 2

An interesting take-down of online learning:

The report said its review of the evidence demonstrated that:

• Online education is the fastest-growing segment of higher education and its growth is overrepresented in the for-profit sector;
• Faculty and academic leaders, employers and the general public are skeptical about the quality and value of online education, which they view as inferior to face-to-face education;
• Students in online education, particularly underprepared and disadvantaged students, underperform and on average experience poor outcomes;
• Online education has failed to improve affordability, frequently costs more than in-person alternatives and does not produce a positive return on investment;
• Regular and substantive student-instructor interactivity is a key determinant of quality in online education, leading to improved student satisfaction, learning and outcomes.

The stakes are high, its co-authors conclude.

“There is a real risk that both cost-cutting efforts and well-intentioned moves to expand access to higher education could lead to greater numbers of disadvantaged students being relegated to cheap and ineffective online instruction, with detrimental results, both in terms of outcomes and student loan defaults,” they wrote.

But not everyone agrees with the report's findings:

However, several experts who read the report said it relied mostly on old data and was overly broad in its conclusions.

The paper indiscriminately trashes online education, said Fiona Hollands, associate director and senior researcher at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

“It's almost all old data, old news and not very even-handed,” she said via email, adding that the report “reads as advocacy more than research and conveniently skips out on some of the more recent and positive stories for students in online learning.”

But...

Ray Schroeder, associate vice chancellor for online learning at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said the report by Protopsaltis and Baum painted online education with too broad a brush. For example, its comparisons between online programs and on-campus ones failed to acknowledge the low graduation rates and default rates of many traditional programs that enroll similarly high percentages of low-income, older students.

...and this is where I land as well.

If you're going to make assertions about the successes or failures of online programs, then you should really make comparisons to "traditional", resident instruction programs. For the most part, the report in question doesn't do that. I would agree with Schroeder that it is essentially incomplete.

The other glaring item in the report is that the phrase "for-profit" appears in the report 66 times, while the phrase "not-for-profit" appears only once. After a cursory read of the findings, the focus of the 'take-down' appears to be on the for-profit institutions. Perhaps a more detailed analysis of the not-for-profit institutions that offer fully on-line degree programs would be warranted.