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Online Courses Not Working Well at Community Colleges

posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 06 2015, @06:19PM   
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 The still-unpublished paper, entitled Online Course-taking and Student Outcomes in California Community Colleges, was presented on April 18, 2015, at the American Educational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.

• Re:The winners in this are the course providers (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

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