For Better or Worse: On-line Education

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Since I am working on the final report on our Disability Access: Computer-integrated training project, I thought I would browse around the Internet and see how other on-line training is received.

One source full of supporters and detractors was Dave Taylor's Intuitive Business Blog, where many, many people weighed in on the University of Phoenix. It sounds as if, like with any institution, there are some good instructors and some bad ones. From the comments overall, the administration sounds terrible. Of course, the fact that they were fined twice by the Department of Education, once for $9.8 million and once for $4.4 million has got to make you think twice about their credibility.

I reviewed a number of sites and articles on on-line learning and distance education. I understand the profit motive, after all, WE are a for-profit corporation, but still, the bias in some of the research by people who surely no better was troubling. After a while, I could almost tell what the results of the 'research' were going to be by looking at the advertisers on the site.

It always irritates me when people say, "You can show anything with statistics."

What you ought to show is the truth, as close as you can get to it. Instead, we have people who say "there is no difference with on-line education" and then measure variables that have no difference. So far, most people really don't want to talk about drop-out rates.

It appears to me that there are significant differences in favor of classroom-based instruction for student drop-out rates. For those students who do persist and complete courses, there seems to be no substantial difference in how much they learn as measured by most types of assessment. 

Still, for both students in classrooms and on-line, the number who DON'T complete courses is far, far too high. That is the  problem Spirit Lake Consulting  is  aiming to address next.

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