Comments on: Faculty discussion of online courses at UCSC

By: gasstationwithoutpumps

gasstationwithoutpumps — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 22:40:52 +0000

There is an audio recording of the meeting available at http://senate.ucsc.edu/senate-meetings/senate-forums/2012-nov-28-forum-online-ed.html

By: Bruno Mendes

Bruno Mendes — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:09:58 +0000

Thank you for the reference. I will definitely want to read their report. As I explained before, this is fundamental for the results to be informative.

By: Bruno Mendes

Bruno Mendes — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 16:08:42 +0000

The vast majority of studies either don’t say how the students were chosen or don’t make a baseline measurement of the student’s ability before the class is offered or both. The very few that do this find evidence that the students who choose the online course are more confident and have higher scores than the ones who take the traditional class (I will find one such study and post it her, if you are interested). This is important when they finally conclude that there’s no difference in the a posteriori scores of the two groups of students; it leads to an important fallacy. In one study they use the term “do no harm test” or something to that effect, that reinforces the suggestion that the performance of the students is not affected by the format of the course (http://oli.cmu.edu/wp-oli/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Lovett_2008_Statistics_Accelerated_Learning_Study.pdf).
I also suspect there are other important biases: like Hawthorne effect and the fact the researchers typically have a lot at stake in the outcomes of the study.
By the way, studies do see to find a difference in the a posteriori tests for hybrid courses (the ones that mix traditional delivery with online content).

Because of this, I personally urge caution going into online education (especially if it involves the university going into debt and especially if there is no conclusive evidence about its effectiveness). I also urge people to not mix the financial/accounting arguments with the quality of teaching arguments. Finally, I would hope that we do not adopt “do no harm”-kind of measurements in the effectiveness of our teaching!

By: Joel Ferguson

Joel Ferguson — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 06:10:34 +0000

I am almost certain it was voluntary. The PBS folks and the EGRs were heavily represented in the on-line version and the anthropology majors (it was an anthro course) were heavily represented in the classical version

By: gasstationwithoutpumps

gasstationwithoutpumps — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 05:50:00 +0000

I don’t know. The teacher was Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, and she said she had a detailed report she’d be willing to send to Senate faculty who were interested, so you could contact her. She did show a shift of the course from mostly in-person to mostly on-line over 4 years, but I didn’t catch whether this was a change in student choices or a change in how much capacity was allocated for each section.

By: Bruno Mendes

Bruno Mendes — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 05:28:00 +0000

On the hybrid course, how were the students split in two halves? Was it voluntary, or were they randomized?