For the One Millionth Time, This is NOT Online Learning…

The Chronicle boldly proclaimed today that “Online Learning May Slightly Hurt Student Performance.” How do they know this? A “study found that students who watched lectures online instead of attending in-person classes performed slightly worse in the course over all.”

That sound you hear is the collective world of EduGeeks around the world firmly planting their palm to their fore head. Online lectures are ten times as boring as the face-to-face version, so no wonder they performed so bad.

(that last statement is based on the results of my scientific study of the volume of snores originating from a few online lecture video based courses I know of)

One of the authors even had this to say: “It’s limited evidence, but I think it’s the highest-quality evidence that’s available.”

Sorry, but it is not anywhere near as good as the other evidence out there.  The previous analysis of online learning by the U.S. Department of Education (that this article mentions) actually looked at many different actual forms of online learning. Not the wanna-be online learning beast called video lectures.

UPDATE: just as a note, The Chronicle did edit the original article and title to “more accurately characterize the research.”  The original title is in the link above. Also, the quote from the authors above was also removed, but it was originally there.

3 thoughts on “For the One Millionth Time, This is NOT Online Learning…

  1. I roared over your response. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m soooo tired of trying to explain to my corporate friends that watching video lectures or “webinars” is NOT online learning

  2. He Matt,

    Of course! So, do you teach online? Just discovered the EdugeekJournal and am interested in knowing more about you and your contributors.

  3. Hello Paula – I do teach online through a University (just one course as an adjunct). All of the other contributors work in the online learning field, mostly at universities as course designers or instructors.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *