Abstract
In the past two decades, one of the most important trends in the US higher education system has been the steady increase in distance education through online courses. College administrators have expressed strong support for online education, signaling that the current online expansion will likely continue. While the supply and demand for online higher education is rapidly expanding, questions remain regarding its potential impact on increasing access, reducing costs, and improving student outcomes. Does online education enhance access to higher education among students who would not otherwise enroll in college? Can online courses create savings for students by reducing funding constraints on postsecondary institutions? Will technological innovations improve the quality of online education? This chapter provides a comprehensive review of existing research on online learning’s impact on access, cost, and student performance in higher education. Our review suggests that online education has the potential to expand access to college, especially among adult learners with multiple responsibilities. Yet, the online delivery format imposes additional challenges to effective instruction and learning. Indeed, existing studies on college courses typically find negative effects of online delivery on course outcomes and the online performance decrement is particularly large among academically less-prepared students. As a result, online courses without strong support to students may exacerbate educational inequities. We discuss a handful of practices that could better support students in online courses, including strategic course offering, student counseling, interpersonal interaction, warning and monitoring, and the professional development of faculty. Yet, college administrative data suggests that high-quality online courses with high degrees of instructor interaction and student support cost more to develop and administer than do face-to-face courses.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, we will use “online course,” and “online learning” interchangeably to refer to semester-length college courses where more than 80% of the course content is delivered online.
- 2.
Higher Education Amendments of 1992, Pub. L. No. 102–325.
- 3.
It should be noted that since the survey did not ask students the motivation for choosing a particular delivery format, some of the top rated reasons are general motivation for course enrollment. More specifically, the top seven reasons students took a distance education course were: (i) the course was convenient with my work schedule; (ii) the course met requirements for the associate degree; (iii) the course met requirements for transfer to a 4-year college or university; (iv) the course would improve my job skill; (v) I had a personal interest in the subject; (vi) I had success with a previous distance education course; and (vii) I enjoy learning on a computer.
- 4.
Individuals who were separated are counted as married; those who were divorced were counted as single.
- 5.
Specifically, the researchers exploited an arbitrary undergraduate GPA cutoff of 3.26 for admission into the online program that is unknown to applicants, and employed a regression discontinuity design to examine the extent to which the quasi-random variation in admission among applicants just above and below that threshold lead to differential higher education enrollment outcomes based on the national student clearinghouse data.
- 6.
It should be noted that the IPEDS uses a relatively more strict definition of online course compared with other national surveys. For example, Babson Survey Research Group and the Instructional Technology Council (ITC) define online courses as those in which at least 80% of instruction is delivered online (Miller et al. 2017). Despite the disparity in definition, however, the trends and descriptive statistics regarding the growth of online courses are fairly consistent across these reports. This is probably due to the fact that fully online course has been dominating online education at the higher education sector and a relatively small proportion of courses are provided through a hybrid format (Streich 2014; Xu and Jaggars 2011).
- 7.
It is worth noting that some universities have multiple campuses. Each campus is treated as an independent institution in IPEDS with unique institution ID, selectivity, and program and enrollment information. Taking DeVry University as an example, all campuses offer at least one online course and nine campuses offer at least one exclusively online program.
- 8.
The five largest programs are (1) Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services; (2) Health Professions and Related Programs; (3) Education; (4) Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services; and (5) Homeland Security, Law Enforcement, Firefighting, and Related Protective Service. We combined “most selective” with “moderately selective” into one category (as opposed to “nonselective”) in Fig. 4.
- 9.
Most of the California community college students who take online courses also take face-to-face classes simultaneously.
- 10.
The differences in costs to deliver a distance course and an on-campus course do not reach statistical significance though.
- 11.
A total of 1,979 new courses were developed since 2004 at UNC. The evaluation team further limits the sample to 801 courses developed between 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 academic years to determine the most recent costs for course development. Finally, the evaluation team stratified the sample by funding category and type (distance vs. on-campus) and randomly selected courses for each category and type. The report includes a more detailed explanation of the sampling methodology in Appendix A.
- 12.
It should be noted that UNC defines “distance education” as “a coherent course of study in which the student is at a distance from the campus and the instructor may or may not be in the same place as the student.” Therefore, the UNC definition of distance education includes a broader range of courses than the typical definition of online course in which course content is delivered fully online.
- 13.
The report indicates that UNC faculty use a variety of technology platforms, where the instruction may be delivered either synchronously (such as through two-way video conferencing or internet chat) or asynchronously (such as providing course materials via video). Faculty in focus group interviews generally agreed that instructors are able to “get to know their distance students better than their on-campus students because mandatory posting requirements for online courses increase student-instructor interaction” (p. 6).
- 14.
The meta-analysis defines online learning as “learning that takes place partially or entirely over the Internet,” which excludes purely print-based correspondence education, videoconferencing, or broadcast television that do not have significant internet-based instruction. The specific practices of online learning vary substantially across studies though, such as the inclusion of computer-mediated asynchronous communication with instructor or peers, video or audio to deliver course content, opportunity for face-to-face time with instructor or peers, etc. The duration of the instruction examined in these studies also varies substantially, ranging from as short as 15 minutes to a semester-long college course.
- 15.
The meta-analysis (U.S. Department of Education 2009, Exhibit 4a) reports the effect sizes for six of these studies as positive for online learning, while one was reported as negative. However, the reexamination of the studies (Jaggars and Bailey 2010) suggests that three should be classified as negative (Davis et al. 1999; Peterson and Bond 2004; Mentzer et al. 2007), one as mixed (Caldwell 2006), two as positive (Cavus et al. 2007; Schoenfeld-Tacher et al. 2001), and one as unclassifiable based on information provided in the published article (LaRose et al. 1998).
- 16.
In synchronous sessions, students would interact with instructors or peers in real time, but not in person, such as through video conferences or chat-based online discussions.
- 17.
It should be noted that a much broader literature used randomized assignments to compare between online and face-to-face training sessions across a variety of settings (e.g., Bello et al. 2005; LaRose et al. 1998; Meyer 2003; Yaverbaum and Ocker 1998; Padalino and Peres 2007; Peterson and Bond 2004). The majority of these studies suggest that student course grades do not differ between the online and face-to-face context. However, results from these studies cannot address the challenging issues inherent in maintaining student attention and motivation over a course of several months, and we therefore focus on studies on semester-length college courses only.
- 18.
Specifically, four types of instructor characteristics are included into the model: (i) the contract status of the instructor (temporary adjuncts, tenure-track non-tenured, or tenured); (ii) years of experience; (iii) whether the instructor is teaching any courses as an overload; and (iv) whether the course is team-taught.
- 19.
Course persistence is defined as persisting to the end of the course, or completing a course no matter if they have received a passing grade. In other words, students are considered to have persisted if they receive any letter grade (A–F) or a pass or no pass designation from a course. Almost all the studies conducted at 4-year institutions did not study course persistence as an outcome, probably because course persistence at 4-year institutions, particularly relatively selective ones, is fairly high regardless which delivery format is used.
- 20.
The authors created an indicator, online-at-risk, defined as students who are academically less prepared (with a first-term face-to-face GPA below 3.0) and who also have at least one of the other demographic characteristics indicating greater risk of poor online performance (i.e., being male, younger, or Black).
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Acknowledgment
The research reported here was supported by the National Science Foundation, through Award 1750386 to University of California, Irvine. The authors are extremely grateful to Cody Christensen for his valuable comments and suggestions on this chapter. They also thank the staff at the American Enterprise Institute for their editorial support during this research project. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of NSF or AEI.
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Appendix A: Experimental and Quasi-experimental Evidence on the Impact of Online Learning on Student Outcomes
Appendix A: Experimental and Quasi-experimental Evidence on the Impact of Online Learning on Student Outcomes
See Table 1
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Xu, D., Xu, Y. (2020). The Ambivalence About Distance Learning in Higher Education. In: Perna, L. (eds) Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31365-4_10
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