Online Learning

Online learning of higher education (college) has increased 17 percent in a year, according to a new report.  I find this interesting for a number of reasons.  First, I teach at a traditional land grant university and second, I spend a lot of time online and thinking about how online will change journalism and what people know.  This study is about learning on demand, part of the larger entertainment on demand that the Internet has made so much a part of our lives.

People want it -- it being pretty much anything these days, from information to entertainment to pizza -- when they want it and not when we want to give it to them.  More and more, this will include education.

Learning Online

Short piece in today's NYTimes suggests that learning online may be superior to face-to-face instruction. Obviously there are a lot of methodological and self-selection issues in play here, yet an interesting if brief article. The actual report, if you feel brave enough to take on 93 pages of pdf, can be found here. It's a meta-analysis, meaning statistical tests from 46 studies (out of a thousand studies on this topic). It's a powerful tool. You have to wade through the methods section to see the criteria for studies to be included, but basically they find -- within the studies that meet their criteria -- that web-based studies work better than face-to-face in K-12 learning. BUT ... the authors caution the small number of studies that meet their criteria makes it difficult to generalize to the K-12 population as a whole. Though important, this kinda gets lost.