Online-Education Study Reaffirms Value of Good Teaching, Experts Say
| July 2, 2009 |  View for printing |
In a much-debated 1983 essay on distance learning, Richard E. Clark, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Southern California, argued that it was beside the point to ask whether distance education is better or worse than the traditional classroom. The medium isn’t the crucial variable, Mr. Clark wrote. What is important is to look at the effectiveness of specific instructional strategies, regardless of how those strategies are delivered.
Last week, more than 25 years after Mr. Clark’s provocation, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that, at least at first glance, carries a strong message about the medium: Students learn more effectively in online settings. Most powerful of all appear to be “blended” courses that offer both faceto- face and online elements. Previous research has generally found that online and offline courses are equally effective.
But even though the report, which synthesized data from several dozen high-quality studies, was framed and publicized as a circuit board-versus-chalkboard showdown, its authors do not view themselves as having flouted Mr. Clark’s principles. On the contrary: Mr. Clark served as a technical adviser to the project, and the report’s lead author says that Mr. Clark’s basic insights are correct.
“This report should not be interpreted as saying that one medium is better than another,” says Barbara Means, a director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, a California research firm that conducted the project under contract with the Education Department. “This should not be interpreted as saying that computers are better than professors.”
Instead, Ms. Means says, the study offers evidence that particular kinds of online instructional techniques are effective—and some of those techniques, she suggests, could theoretically be imported into old-fashioned chalkboard classrooms. For example, the study found that in online courses, students often spend more time directly engaging with the course content than do their counterparts in traditional classrooms. But in theory, there is no reason why traditional courses could not be redesigned to increase students’ “time on task.”
By DAVID GLENN
Full Report: http://mus.edu/news/OnlineEdStudy.pdf 
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