Berkley professor says her online class is more effective than her F2F.

Here is some nice support for online classes. It appears that a professor at Berkley has found that the same subject matter offered in her online class and her face to face class has shown that the online class is more effective.

This is good ammunition against those who are saying that DL is inferior to B&M education.
http://bobhails.com/articles/differences%20in%20learning%20outcomes%20for%20the%20online%20and%20f2f%20versions%20of%20a%20shakespeare%20course.pdf

Thanks to our new member Balios for sharing this link! It was in his post in the other Berkley thread, but the link is significant enough to deserve its own thread.

 

So....the resulting question becomes, is this a case of a particular class at Berkeley being more effective online vs. face-to-face, i.e. what's it say about Berkeley, the course, the teacher....yada yada...basically, perhaps not a case of "good ammo" at all. imho.

 

Your statement doesn't make sense. If you read the article, you will see it was one particular class where the students learned the material more effectively online than they did in-person; nothing more is intended to be said here.

 

The problem with this particular example is that the educational mode wasn't the only difference. There were many other differences as well, in things like student age, class size, and motivation.

*****

Here is how the B&M students were described:

- "The classes ranged from 50 to nearly 200 students, with a large (100 plus) lecture being the norm"
- "mostly traditional age undergraduates"
- "both English majors picking up the Shakespeare requirement for the major and non-English majors fulfilling a humanities equirement"

So the B&M students were probably mostly 18-20 years old, in large and impersonal lecture classes. It is likely that many (perhaps most) of the B&M students were taking the class not because of a particular interest in Shakespeare, but to fulfill graduation requirements.

*****

Now here is how the online students were described:

- "The online course averages about 12 active students at any one time."
- "mostly college-educated working adults"
- "Those who complete the online class are often the “very models” of Malcolm Knowles’ description of an adult learner—experienced, self-directive, task-oriented, interested in problem-solving and immediate application."

So the online students were mostly mature adults in small classes. It is likely that many (perhaps most) of the online students actually were taking the class because they genuinely were interested in Shakespeare.

*****

So the online students had the advantages of being in small classes with motivated classmates. That counts for a lot.

 

And here is another important point:

So the author is stating that most online students drop out. The author is obviously impressed by the online students that do complete the course, and probably for good reason -- but they are in the minority.

In contrast, for the B&M ("F2F") students:

So most B&M students complete the class.

If the evaluation of educational outcomes included dropouts, then online education would not look nearly as good in this example.

 

CalDog, the author would disagree with you. Here's a paste from the article:

My conclusion that the structure of my online Shakespeare course interacts with and intensifies the
salience of adult learning styles and therefore, the effectiveness of student-centered and andragogical
teaching practices, was a discovery for me. It was Newton’s apple. Then, a bit of preliminary research on
my part uncovered an orchard of the same apples falling on a cohort of theoretically savvy and
experienced instructors. My “discovery” represents a widely held consensus that an online classroom has
a structural bias toward student-centered learning among knowledgeable online teachers and course
designers in education at all levels, not only in adult education.

 

Fortunately, we do not have to rely on a single study. Since the late 1920s, a myriad of studies have been done comparing the achievement of students taught in a traditional face-to-face environment with those taught using "media" (film, audio, television, cable, videoconference, computer-based training, online courses). These studies have, by and large, found no significant difference in achievement between face-to-face and technology-delivered instruction.

The latest meta-analysis compiled by the U.d. Dept. of Education found that students in online and hybrid environments often had higher levels of achievement than those in face-to-face environments. This is not due to the technology per se, but because in the online and hybrid environments, students were spending more time on their studies.

Whenever I encounter someone who claims that online learning is inferior to face-to-face, I merely ask them to produce any body of empirical evidence (say, more than one study) that students learn worse online. So far, no one has been able to do it (most likely because such a body of data does not exist).

 

Thanks for that Dr. P. It's nice to see some support coming from Berkley to add to the others. I have asked for empirical evidence about the inferiority of online classes and have met with the same results that you have.

 

This statement from the study made me cringe:

The online course makes use of the following features:
• Approximately 40,000 words of online lecture notes

Given 40,000 words of lecture notes I would probably drop out too! I would be more interested in seeing performance where both sets of students are given the same tools, i.e. the on-line students are given access to video lectures that mimic F2F classes. Performance would likely be as Dr. P noticed, unchanged compared to the F2F class, likely because of a lower attrition rate.

 

40,000 words is about 75 - 150 pages, depending on spacing. That's still a lot, especially on top of other reading, but it doesn't sound as bad as 40,000 words.