As MOOCs and similar online platforms have seen millions of students enroll on the panoply of free courses, the question has understandably shifted to just what kind of societal impact these courses may have.
Will they provide society with the kind of low-cost learning that will allow people to adapt to rapid changes in the labor market? Will they broaden access to the kind of elite institutions that have historically only served a privileged few?
A recent Harvard led study set out to examine the impact online degree courses have had on their more traditional brethren. Are online students substituting physical education or are they a new, and previously untapped market?
The impact of online learning
The focus of the study is the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) offered by the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). The campus based course is regularly rated amongst the best in the country, and in 2014 the university began offering an online version of it for approximately 1/6 the price of the existing offering.
Georgia Tech attempt to distinguish the course from MOOC like programs by not mentioning that it’s delivered online, with the ultimate aim being to have very little difference between the student body on each course in terms of their abilities.
The authors begin by comparing the applicants to both forms of course. Interestingly, whilst the online course understandably has a much larger applicant pool, there is hardly any overlap between the two. Whilst the physical course applicants tend to be around 24 years of age, those in the online variant were much older, averaging nearly 34.
As such, the authors believe that offering the online course significantly increases the pool of people who might take the degree.
“Such access thus substantially increases the number of students enrolling at all. The higher education market appears to have been failing to meet demand for this online option,” the authors say.
Quality vs quantity
Of course, a common refrain used against online courses is that whilst they clearly allow many more people to study, the quality is not so high as in their physical variants.
To test this, the authors blind tested candidates from both streams. Far from performing worse than their in-person peers, the online cohort actually scored better in the tests.
What’s more, the persistence rates are also significantly higher than in other online platforms such as MOOCs. Among the early students, some 62% remained on the course after two years, with this in itself a low figure because 25% of those who take a semester off of the course do re-enroll to try and complete it later.
“Given the nearly 1,200 Americans enrolling each year in OMSCS and assuming only those 62 percent graduate, this implies production of at least 725 new American computer science master’s degrees holders annually. Roughly 11,000 Americans earn their master’s degree in computer science each year, implying that this single program will boost annual national production of American computer science master’s degrees by about seven percent,” the authors reveal.
I’ve written several times about the crucial importance of lifelong learning, especially as disruption in the labor market is growing, so having some strong evidence that these lower cost programs deliver high quality education is very welcome indeed.
