by Tony Bates, Online Learning and Distance Education Resources
It can be seen that there are methodological challenges in trying to assess the impact of online learning on productivity. Nevertheless we don’t have to have perfect answers – we need to know where the balance of evidence is leading. However, at the moment, we don’t have even this – or rather the evidence is scattered across a large range of sources and is not collected together with a view to looking at the issue of productivity. Indeed, institutions are sitting on much of the data needed to answer many of the questions posed in this post. What is needed is more analysis and communication of the findings that would flow from this analysis…. I believe we can provide reasonably good answers on the impact of online learning on access, at least, and this could show that it has increased the productivity of the system by bringing in students who would otherwise have been excluded.
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