I read carefully a recent article in the San Diego Union-Tribune called Online Class Takers Less Likely to Pass. I am interested in online successful retention rates, the percentage of students passing the class. For online classes at community colleges, successful retention has always hovered around 10% lower for online than traditional classes.
The 10% holds. According to the article, online class successful retention rates are about 60% at California community colleges vs 70% in traditional classes. The article wants to examine why.
But it also presents an even bigger gap. The article says:
Researchers also found that achievement gaps are exacerbated in the online world. For example, the gap between white and African-American students in traditional classes was 12.9 percentage points; that widens to 17.5 points in online courses. They said that might be partly a reflection of the digital divide, where some students don’t have access to computers and broadband.
I’ve heard this argument many times, that the digital divide makes it hard for students to access the technology they need to be successful in online classes. I think someone needs to acknowledge that this is far less true now, in this state, in this country, than anywhere, ever.
Historically, those with lower incomes tend to purchase items for social reasons, even at the risk of sacrificing quality in housing and food. This has been true since at least the Victorian era, and Thorstein Veblen even wrote a book about it in 1899. I have a number of socio-economically disadvantaged students, and they all have smart phones.
As for race, according to Pew research, more AfricanAmerican and Hispanic people in the US have smart phones than “white” people. And, if we want to get away from race and look only at income, 47% of people earning less than $30,000/year have a smart phone.
Although I don’t recommend taking an online class on a smart phone, many of my students do.
In addition, all the college’s students have access via our computer labs on all our campuses, and local public libraries.
This is not that kind of digital divide.
Someone needs to talk about three very real reasons that there is an offset online achievement gap for certain groups:
1. The primary pedagogy of online class continues to be text-based.
For most online classes, the assignments include reading text. Lots of text. And students must write for most of the heavy General Education classes, and they must do it in standard written English, at the college level, on their smart phone or a crowded library. It seems to me likely that those who do poorly with text would have a better chance of success with alternative assignments. That said, such assignments may not be considered appropriate by the instructor as a way of determining whether material was learned. In my history classes, you must write.
2. Students expect flexibility of time to mean less time.
This is mentioned briefly in the article, that students may enroll thinking an online class will be less work. I think it’s just a confusion between flexibility and total time. Self-directed students budget time appropriately, but others assume that because they can work any time, the total time for the class will somehow be different. If you ask students how many classes they can handle during a semester, they often assume they could handle more if the classes were online.
3. The lives of those struggling to meet basic needs is not conducive to the concentration required of online classes.
Here we have to make the jump from race, which is the focus of the article’s statement, to class, which is more to the point. When you are raising your siblings and carrying two low-paying jobs to feed everyone, even if you have a smart phone there may be no good space in which to work. There’s no time to go to the library. I have a number of students from military families and others with very complex arrangements at home. I have students who have been thrown out of the house and are living in their car. For these people, the time spent in a classroom may be the only time they have to focus on the material. Online classes are a poor option.
This last one is the divide no one wants to talk about, because it involves getting into a deeper discussion of poverty, and the lack of social services and public money available to help. Start talking about this, and you must talk about food stamps and living in a country that provides help for tuition at community colleges but can’t help people with hunger and living circumstances. It’s easier to blame poverty itself for failing to provide the means to buy technology.
If the reason for achievement differences were access to technology, the gap would have narrowed in this age of the rapidly increasing adoption of mobile technologies. But it hasn’t – the 10% hasn’t budged. It won’t surprise me if the larger gap holds too.
After over a decade of this, I’m looking forward to the discussion of the digital divide getting broader.
Wow, Lisa, what a great post; these factors are all things I see very much at work in the classes I teach. There are a lot of factors that go into class completion/achievement, and I am glad that the rates at my school for online courses are very good (that’s how our online course program has justified itself over the years), although that success is very much a result of class size (online courses in my college are supposed to be 30 students, not more). With a small class size, the instructor can do a lot of intervention to help with the factors you have identified here; I spend a considerable amount of time not just on class content but also class management, working with students individually as I see they are struggling and/or when they contact me to ask for help so that we can figure out good ways to make the class work for them (how they schedule the work, what tasks they focus on and what tasks they might safely skip, managing a semester-long project in a way that is effective and exciting, etc.). In more serious situations, I’ve worked with students on getting counseling, legal help, emergency funding from school, etc. (my school is actually surprisingly good about stuff like that, provided students know about emergency grant program and other special financial aid). Since my total student load each semester is around 90-100 students, I can provide every student with an abundance of personal attention, and having that personal attention is something that can help a lot in terms of student achievement, esp. for struggling students, reluctant writers, etc. I welcome the factors you identify here as good challenges for me as a teacher, but I would not feel able to face that challenge if I had a huge teaching load… and as I recall you are working with twice as many or even more students than I am, is that right? I would be curious how student completion and other success rates correlate with class size AND with instructors’ overall teaching loads!