Community Colleges and Online Learning

Dear Commons Community,

On Thursday, I was invited to be part of a panel at Hostos Community College (along with Eva Fernandez (Queens College) and Helen Robinson (CSI)) to discuss online and blended learning.  I thought the discussions and give and take were quite good.   Yesterday in my email box was an alert to a policy brief entitled,  Online Learning: Does It Help Low-Income and Underprepared Students? issued by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College.   It covers a number of important issues raised during our discussions at Hostos and is based on a review of 36 studies conducted in the United States and Canada.   Among the findings:

“In terms of course completion, studies conducted in the community college setting strongly suggest that students are more likely to withdraw from online courses, even after controlling for a variety of student characteristics. Moreover, perhaps due to those high withdrawal rates, some tentative evidence suggests that taking online courses may discourage students from returning to the community college in subsequent semesters and from moving on to subsequent courses in their program sequence.”

There are a number of other interesting findings and comments.

This Brief is based on CCRC Working Paper No. 26, part of the CCRC Assessment of Evidence Series, which is available for download free of charge at http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Publication.asp?UID=879

Tony

 

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