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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 The still-unpublished paper, entitled Online Course-taking and Student Outcomes in California Community Colleges, was presented on April 18, 2015, at the American Educational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.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday May 06 2015, @06:44PM
I've done a fuckton of online classes, and I always assumed that they were for people who were more interested in jumping through the hoop and ticking off another requirement rather than actually giving a damn about retaining the material "learned." I actually took calc I online, and while I learned the concepts, I Mapled [wikipedia.org] away most of the tedium (which was informative in its own right, because I had to know the algorithms to write worksheets that solved the various problems).
Of course they almost always have a threaded discussion component which is worth peanuts compared to the assignments and exams to make it kinda sorta interactive.
Finally, and we all know this, college is for adults. Adults who have the discipline to roll out of bed when they have to, bathe when they have to, and do homework when they have to. If they lack the discipline to follow through with online classes, then they should show up to class physically. If they have the opportunity to do both but squander it, then they deserve to flip burgers for life. Classes are tedious and potentially frustrating but far less stressful than the average day in Somalia.