As the MOOC revolution gathered pace, there was a widespread hope that it would prompt a major change in how tertiary education was provided.  After all, they emerged in an environment where course fees were mushrooming, and many young people were graduating with enormous debts.

Could online courses therefore provide a more efficient means of getting a degree?

Whilst there is still a largely optimistic air around MOOCs, a recent study provides a cautionary tale.

The paper compares the performance of community college students who undertook their courses online versus more traditional classroom based studies.

About the study

The focus of the research was the Californian Community College system, which ‘processes’ 2.3 million students each year.  The study found that students on online courses achieved both lower grades and completion rates than their peers on more traditionally delivered courses.

“We found the same pattern of results across all course types,” the authors say.

This drop off in performance was particularly pronounced when students were undertaking courses outside of the normal academic year.  They also appeared to suffer when the online segment of the student body for a class was in a relative minority.

“The consistency of our results is important from a policy perspective,” the authors say. “Policymakers in California and other states are interested in exploring whether online courses can be used to expand instruction and improve outcomes, but there may be costs to this strategy.”

Of course, this isn’t the first study into the success, or otherwise, of online courses.  Last year, for instance, saw a study of student success at MIT.

When the researchers tested both MOOC students on a MIT physics class and their offline peers, they found that the knowledge learned via the MOOC was greater than that in the traditional, lecture based course.

What’s more, they found that even those MOOC students that were not at all well prepared for their course (ie those with low scores before the course started), ended up learning just as well as their fellow students.  The rate of improvement was almost equal regardless of the skill level at the outset of the course.

Another study highlighted the large spread of people that typically enroll for online courses, and the challenges this creates on how to motivate and engage such a diverse body.

They identified five distinct type of student:

1. Bystandars are students who are probably at the lowest end of the engagement ladder.  They’ll sign up for a course, but then not really engage with it.  Some might not even log-in to the course once it begins.
2. Collectors on the other hand are slightly further up the ladder.  They’ll consume the video content provided by the course, but they won’t do a great deal of interaction with fellow students.
3. Viewers are similar to the collectors in that their primary means of engagement with the course is via the lectures.  Despite watching the content however, the viewer is unlikely to complete many of the assignments.
4. Solvers tend to be polar opposite to the viewers.  They’ll do a lot of the assignments, without necessarily having watched the lectures beforehand.
5. All rounders are undoubtedly the holy grail however, as these are the people that do it all.  They’ll watch the lectures and do the assignments.

Whether students at community colleges fit into one or other of these groups is difficult to determine, but I suspect a much wider exploration is required in order to draw particularly firm conclusions.