As the world shut down during the Covid pandemic, a growing proportion of our lives shifted online, whether work, entertainment, or socializing. It’s debatable whether many of these activities were effective substitutes for the face-to-face alternatives they replaced, but research from Cornell suggests that our transition to online learning was not only as effective but also helped to democratize education.
The researchers analyzed data from DataCamp, an online coding bootcamp, and compared it with the staggered closure of nonessential business across the United States to try and understand the impact of these closures on the demand for online learning.
The analysis reveals that as nonessential businesses were closed, there was a 38% increase in new users at DataCamp, with a 6% boost in the engagement of existing users of the platform. What’s more, this was evident across all demographic groups.
“The pandemic altered people’s schedules in ways that gave some of them opportunities for online learning. We were curious how this affected people’s engagement in online learning and the fact that states responded at different times enable us to explore this at large scale and see if it created further inequalities,” the researchers say.
Desire for learning
“Although many people have focused on the adverse effects of the pandemic, one of the silver linings has been the disruption to traditional models of learning. People are starting to see that where there’s a will, there’s a way—plenty of learning options now exist,” they continue.
The researchers harvested anonymized user records from DataCamp from January 2018 through to September 2020. The platform offers around 400 self-paced and interactive courses on a range of topics, including applied finance and Python for data science. The first chapter of every course is free, with a monthly fee of between $25 and $33 then applied.
The data was aggregated by ZIP code with the researchers also determining things like the population density, median income, race and age distribution, and income-level distribution for each area. They also gathered daily county data on Covid cases and deaths from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, and weekly county data on compliance with social distancing policies from location-data firm Unacast.
In total, they gathered data on over 277,000 new users and 70,000 existing users from across the US. The wide geographic spread of users highlighted the noticeable impact of the pandemic across the land, but equally noticeable was the increase in engagement during the pandemic period.
Growing engagement
For instance, as nonessential businesses closed, new-user registrations grew by 9%. This grew to 14% after the researchers applied ZIP code-specific demographic characteristics. This suggests that the regions hit hardest by the pandemic also saw the most growth in online enrollment.
“We already know that time constraints are one of the biggest barriers for people who learn online,” the researchers say. “It’s the No. 1 reason people give for dropping out. The stay-at-home orders and nonessential business closures were essentially an intervention on all people’s daily routines in a way that may have opened up time for them to pursue these educational endeavors.”
The researchers believe that their findings illustrate the crucial role such online platforms can play in providing an accessible and inclusive environment for the learning of new skills, even among those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The researchers plan to further examine the topic and will look to understand how this increase in learning has translated into the labor market.
“Now that more people sought out online learning, and acquired new technical skills, do we see any impact on the labor market?” they conclude. “Are they changing jobs, are they getting promoted, or any other tangible outcomes of having gone out of their way to acquire new skills and maybe earn certificates associated with the courses?”
