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

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 The still-unpublished paper, entitled Online Course-taking and Student Outcomes in California Community Colleges, was presented on April 18, 2015, at the American Educational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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06 2015, @06:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06 2015, @06:59PM (#179622)

    Online courses may not be as effective, but they are cheaper and more accessible to more students.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday May 06 2015, @07:17PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 06 2015, @07:17PM (#179631)

    but they are cheaper

    At my midwestern liberal arts college about a decade ago, they charged us something like $50/class more for "technology fee" for online classes.

    Also I got to buy my own software and "stuff" and computer obviously, whereas kids on campus would just use the free lab. Of course with academic discounts, something like Microsoft Excel 2003 lists at like $995 for a legal corporate copy but academic price was like $7 or something near that, which basically barely paid for the box and cdrom. Too cheap to even bother torrenting. They hadn't figured out the textbook scam of increasing the price until the students start throwing molotovs in protest. Maybe academic software costs $2500 now, like I'd expect.

    Also BTW textbooks are all new being ordered online not used. So that's probably $10 to $20 extra. And no out of state sales tax, but shipping is more than sales tax. At least I don't have to wait in line, staring at the back of young women in yoga pants for an hour in line. Oh wait, maybe brick and mortar really was better. And ISBNs and distribution are tightly controlled so you couldn't buy books from Amazon only the school textbook store (those bastards). And the school textbook store being 100s of miles away means no selling back at the end of semester. So shipping is more expensive than tax, no buying used books, no yoga pants effect, and no selling books back, what a great deal.

    And believe it or not the easiest way to do the proctored exams was to drive all the way to the closest campus where any school instructor would proctor you sitting in the back of their lecture room, or any administrator could proctor you (librarian, receptionist, generic office drone, etc) So I saved gas on normal weeks but burned it all and then some for midterms and finals.

    So yeah, absolutely everything about it was more expensive, although not horribly so.