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As online education proliferates, is it effective for those students who are already at risk because they may not be well prepared for higher education in the first place?
As reported in Inside Higher Ed, a new study from the Brookings Institution found that students who are the least prepared for traditional college also fare the worst in online courses. For top students, taking an online course didn’t definitively have a negative effect on a student’s grade point average. But for others -- especially lower-performing students -- taking online courses was associated with higher dropout rates and lower grades, both at the time the courses were taken and in future semesters, when compared to students who took classes in person.
The study’s authors, Eric Bettinger of Stanford University and Susanna Loeb of the Center on Children and Families, wrote in the study that online classes aren’t living up to their potential. “While online courses may have the potential to differentiate course work to meet the needs of students with weaker incoming skills, current online courses, in fact, do an even worse job of meeting the needs of these students than do traditional in-person courses,” they said.
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