The Distribution of Learning Benefits for Web-Facilitated Courses

Abstract

Web-facilitated courses are flexible, cost-saving, repeatable and at least as good as traditional education in quality, as discovered by most of the online education researchers. However, defining and optimizing the online learning benefits is still evolving. In this work, we assess the distribution of learning benefits for online teaching by evaluating a combination of recorded data and survey instruments collected from an online course offered at the University of Arizona. We observe a significant positive relationship between the online learning outcome and students’ effort in learning the course materials. Factors that positively affect the outcome also include the time spent in traditional classroom learning, students’ cumulative academic performance, and other demographic characteristics. In additional, online learning contributes tremendously to examination performance. Determinants of active participation in online learning are also evaluated, and strong correlation with previous learning experiences is observed.