Saturday, February 9, 2013
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Blog's Effectivity in Education
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom
Update | 11:08 p.m. Read an article by Steve Lohr on keeping abreast of innovation in the Continuing Education special section.
A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education,
has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On
average, students in online learning conditions performed better than
those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
Noah Berger for The New York Times Tyler Kennedy, 9, searches the Web at home in California.
The
report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional
classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings,
but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult
continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to
the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies
in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom
performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of
Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the
course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance,
compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th
percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.“The
study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning
today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better
than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead
author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.
This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the
report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply
over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than
electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has
really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and
collaboration tools.
The real promise of online education, experts
say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to
individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more
“learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
Resource: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/study-finds-that-online-education-beats-the-classroom/
Resource: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/study-finds-that-online-education-beats-the-classroom/
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