By Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed
Peter Shea, an associate professor of education at the State University of New York at Albany, said the study he presented here, “Does Online Learning Help Community College Students Attain a Degree?” was spurred by a series of studies published in the last two years by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. In contrast to the CCRC studies, the Albany research found that students who had enrolled in at least one online course in their first year did not come into college with better academic preparation than did those who took no courses at a distance. And students who took online courses at a distance were 1.25 times likelier to earn a credential (certificate, associate or bachelor’s degree) by 2009 than were their peers who had not taken any online courses. Those who started college with a goal of attaining a certificate (rather than a bachelor’s degree) and took online courses were 3.22 times as likely to earn a credential than were students who did not take online courses.
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