Inside Higher Education’s Latest Survey of Faculty Attitudes to Online and Blended Learning Just Released!

Inside Education 2014 Blended Learning I

Inside Education 2014 Blended Learning

Inside Education 2014 Blended Learning II

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Dear Commons Community,

Inside Higher Education annually commissions Gallup to conduct an opinion survey of college faculty and technology administrators. In the latest study, Gallup surveyed 2,799 faculty members and 288 academic technology administrators this past summer on a number of issues related to online learning. A copy of the report can be downloaded here. Highlights as summarized by Inside Higher Education include:

  • Virtually all faculty members and technology administrators say meaningful student-teacher interaction is a hallmark of a quality online education, and that it is missing from most online courses.
  • A majority of faculty members with online teaching experience still say those courses produce results inferior to in-person courses.
  • Faculty members are overwhelmingly opposed to their institutions hiring outside “enablers” to manage any part of online course operation, even for marketing purposes.
  • Humanities instructors are most likely to say they have benefited from the digital humanities — but also that those digital techniques have been oversold.

“Only about one-quarter of faculty respondents (26 percent) say online courses can produce results equal to in-person courses. While that represents a slight increase from last year’s survey, when only one in five said so, that top-line number fails to communicate that most faculty members maintain serious doubts about being able to interact or indeed teach students in online courses.

The doubt extends across age groups and most academic disciplines. Tenured faculty members may be the most critical of online courses, with an outright majority (52 percent) saying online courses produce results inferior to in-person courses, but that does not necessarily mean opposition rises steadily with age. Faculty respondents younger than 40, for example, are more critical of online courses (38 percent) than are those between the ages of 50 and 59 (34 percent).”

Several of the other findings also point to positive attitudes and experiences with blended courses.   For example, the percentage (50% – see Table 11) of faculty who had taught a blended course versus the percentage (33% – see Table 9) who  had taught a fully online course indicate  that blended courses are continuing to move well into the mainstream of American higher education.  Furthermore, Table 17 indicates that the vast majority (75-80%) of the faculty are moving to blended courses for sound pedagogical reasons.

Tony

 

One comment

  1. Informative piece.

    In my opinion, actual outcomes carry greater weight over opinion when it comes to looking at the performance of fully or partially online courses. The difference between the traditional lecture format and hybrid/blended format is very small now according to one piece of recent research (http://www.nber.org/papers/w20006). That the hybrid format is still relatively new suggests that learning and experience benefits, not to mention continuing advances in technology, might well fully eliminate that gap in the not too distant future. A scenario where the hybrid format offers superior value with respect to learning outcomes might not be implausible.