Online Education vs. the Classroom

March 23, 2010 by Paul Richlovsky

Via The New York Times‘ “Bits” blog, a study from last summer for the Department of Education (done by SRI International) sheds some light on the potential of online education to surpass traditional education.

The essence of the study (PDF) produced quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses over a 12-year span. Among 99 studies, students doing some/all of the course online ranked in the 59th percentile on average in tested performance, vs. the 50th percentile for the average classroom student.

The upshot of this study is the promise that online education can tailor learning experiences to individual students better than classrooms, which enables more experiential learning, or learning by doing.

Additionally, according to Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program:

“The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways …”�

Read more details about the study in Steve Lohr’s writeup, “Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom.”

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See what iPad brings to the higher-education party and what the “teaching naked” movement might say about iPads and other technology in the classroom.

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Photo courtesy of Martin Kingsley via Flickr.