Robert Ubell, Inside Higher Ed
Recent research on the wisdom of students from underrepresented populations taking online courses is not easy to untangle, with contradictory results, depending on what investigators are looking at and which population slices are being studied. Some conclude that retention rates for low-income students are worse online than face-to-face. Others say that there is little or no difference between the two. Most agree that mixing and matching online with on-campus delivers the best results. Karen Swan, James J. Stukel Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Illinois, says that her research predicts a few essential features about the composition of online students — apart from being more likely to be female, they are also older and poorer than their face-to-face peers, and consequently, more likely to go online part-time. As expected, part-time students on campus, too, have a high dropout rate. But insightfully, her research concludes that “there is no difference between online and on-campus part-time students.”
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