Dear Commons Community,

Online Learning Journal (formerly JALN) published its latest issue yesterday featuring the best papers presented at the OLC 21st International Conference on Online Learning and Innovate 2016.  The nine papers selected for this issue cover a range of topics and issues on online and blended learning in both K-12 and higher education. I, along with colleagues Paige McDonald (The George Washington University) and Patsy Moskal (University of Central Florida), were the issue’s guest editors. 

An example of the articles is one entitled, Assessing Readiness for Online Education – Research Models for Identifying Students at Risk, written by our CUNY colleagues, Claire Wladis, Katherine M. Conway, and Alyse C. Hachey (Borough of Manhattan Community College). Their study explored the interaction between student characteristics and the online environment in predicting course performance and subsequent college persistence among students in a large urban U.S. university system. Multilevel modeling, propensity score matching, and the KHB decomposition method were used. The most consistent pattern observed was that native-born students were at greater risk online than foreign-born students, relative to their face-to-face outcomes. Having a child under 6 years of age also interacted with the online medium to predict lower rates of successful course completion online than would be expected based on face-to-face outcomes. In addition, while students enrolled in online courses were more likely to drop out of college, online course outcomes had no direct effect on college persistence; rather other characteristics seemed to make students simultaneously both more likely to enroll online and to drop out of college.

The issue is available for free download at:  http://onlinelearningconsortium.org/read/online-learning-journal/

Tony