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Online Courses Not Working Well at Community Colleges

posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 06 2015, @06:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-tax-dollars-at-work dept.

"gewg_" writes:

AlterNet reports

Online instruction at community colleges isn't working--yet policymakers are continuing to fund programs to expand online courses at these schools, which primarily serve low-income minority students, and community college administrators are planning to offer more and more of them.

The latest salvo comes from researchers at the University of California-Davis, who found that community college students throughout California were 11 percent less likely to finish and pass a course if they opted to take the online version instead of the traditional face-to-face version of the same class. The still-unpublished paper, entitled Online Course-taking and Student Outcomes in California Community Colleges, was presented on April 18, 2015, at the American Educational Research Association's annual conference in Chicago.

[...]Community colleges [educate 45 percent of the nation's undergraduates] and [that sector] is under fire for low graduation rates.

[...]Despite the flexibility, it appears that many students find it hard to manage their time to complete the lectures and coursework throughout an entire semester.

[...]These are very different results from what researchers are finding for students at four-year colleges.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by BananaPhone on Wednesday May 06 2015, @06:37PM

    by BananaPhone (2488) on Wednesday May 06 2015, @06:37PM (#179613)

    They have a vested interest in keeping this gravy train going.

    You can learn through online courses but YOU are the driving force.
    It's not for everyone.
    If you can't be bothered to learn through a book, don't waste your time on online courses.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 06 2015, @08:28PM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday May 06 2015, @08:28PM (#179659) Homepage
    Whilst I almost entirely agree with you, there can be something about the delivery, even things as simple as the intonation, of a spoken lecture which can help the understanding of academic material. You get to hear which is the handle-turning and which is the important and interesting shit. I know I don't learn well from books. I wish I did. Which means I can get more from recorded lectures - because I want to. However, if the lecture is delivered by some kind of robotronic academodroid, then I'm probably gonna be no better than with a book. (And yet again I have to list the lectures from http://www.gravity-and-light.org/lectures/ as being the best lectures I've ever virtually attended - thanks to whomever first posted those here.)
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves