by Amy Southernland, the Atlantic
On May 22, Ithaka S&R released “Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials,” a study that helps validate the efficacy of online learning at the college level and points to some of its potential benefits. The full report is worth a look, but here are the basics: 605 students at six public universities were randomly assigned to take an introductory statistics course in either a traditional format or a hybrid format. The hybrid format combined machine-guided instruction–what the researchers refer to as ILO, or “Interactive Learning Online”–along with one hour of face-to-face instruction each week. Matthew M. Chingos, a fellow at the Brown Center on Education at The Brookings Institution, was one of the study’s co-authors, and here’s how he summarized the findings: “We found that students in the hybrid format did just as well–in terms of pass rates, final exam scores, and performance on a standardized statistics test–as their counterparts in the traditional version of the same course.” The study also found that online learning was more efficient, at least for this particular class.
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