For Students Taking Online Courses, a Completion Paradox

If you look just at completion rates for individual online courses, they seem like a bad option. A growing body of research shows that community-college students are much more likely to fail a class taken online than one taken face to face, and grades in online courses are often lower. But that’s just one part of the picture.

Online courses are actually contributing to better completion rates in degree programs, arguably the more important metric when considering the impact of an education on a student’s future. A national study published in 2014 found that community-college students who take at least one online course are as much as 25 percent more likely to earn a degree than those who study only in physical classrooms. Many factors are at play, but for many students the convenience of online can mean the difference between staying in a degree program or dropping out.

Some have called this the “online paradox,” and it highlights the complicated track record of the shift to digital classrooms.

Talking to just about any online student — even a successful one — illustrates how such a seemingly contradictory pattern emerged.

Mark Walton is 24 years old and lives in the rural community of Willow Spring, N.C. He recently got out of the Army after serving in Afghanistan, and he is taking a mix of online and in-person courses toward a degree in criminal justice from North Carolina Central University. He’s a full-time student, but he’s also working part time at the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, and he’s helping his brother raise soybeans and corn on their family farm.

He calls himself “determined” to finish on time, and he is mostly getting A’s. His one B so far was in an online course, and he says the online courses are just harder to keep up with. “What’s really the hardest thing is being overloaded, and time management,” he says. And in online courses, it takes longer to get an answer from the professor when you’re stuck and you can’t just raise your hand to ask.

He admits, though, that without the online courses in the mix, he might not be in college at all. “As busy as I am, I need to take the online classes, even though I don’t want to,” he says. “I’ve just been gritting my teeth.”

Making the Grade

Lower pass rates are a longstanding problem in online courses, and they persist despite a variety of strategies to improve them. A study done in California’s community-college system found that students are 10 to 14 percent less likely to pass an online course than a face-to-face course, says Hans P. Johnson, a senior policy fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

“For efficiency’s sake you don’t want to have a lot of students taking courses and failing them,” he says. “We need to do more to identify success practices in online learning so more students are successful in the courses themselves.”

Mr. Johnson’s study found that online courses’ inconsistent quality contributed to the problem. “They ran the gamut from lecture notes in PowerPoint format that were just put online with not much interactions from students to much more sophisticated online courses that were more interactive,” he says. Just putting raw materials online and expecting students to figure it out works for some highly motivated students, but many students need more. The community-college system’s Online Education Initiative is working to improve quality and deal with retention issues, he says.

Many colleges already take steps to warn students about the level of self-discipline and access to technology needed to succeed in an online course, says Mark Jenkins, director of e-learning and open education at the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges. One popular approach is to have students take a “readiness indicator” quiz before signing up for their first online course, though passing the quiz is not mandatory.

Mr. Jenkins also says today’s students are accustomed to easy-to-use online systems in their consumer lives, so he thinks colleges should strive to be as customer-friendly as a site like Amazon.com. “We don’t want students to get lost pointing and clicking before they can get to a help desk,” he says. “We don’t want it to be like calling Comcast. We want it to be a much cleaner experience.”

It’s important to remember that community colleges face the same issue of completion rates even in face-to-face courses — in individual courses and in degree programs — since they are open-access and admit students with a range of college readiness, says Mr. Jenkins. “What we’re trying to do with online courses is create a suite of options to allow students to get what they need when they need it.”

Different Scenarios

The upside of the online paradox is that many students who may have struggled in a particular online course go on to earn the larger prize of a degree.

To understand that, you have to look more closely at different subgroups, not just the state or national averages, says Shanna Smith Jaggars, director of student-success research at Ohio State University and a researcher for the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

“It may be that different things are happening for different kinds of people,” she explains.

“For instance, you may have an older white woman who is employed full time and caring for dependents and working on a degree” — that student, with time-management skills and professional experience, will probably do well on an online course, Ms. Jaggars says. “And having the flexibility to fit it into her schedule will make it possible to work on her degree.”

By contrast, a student in a low-income neighborhood who is just out of high school, and may not be as prepared for college, may have a very different experience. “They take an online course and do much more poorly than they would if they had taken it face to face,” Ms. Jaggars says. “That might have really negative consequences,” if the student then decides college isn’t a good fit and stops taking courses.

Meanwhile, “kind of average” community-college students are likely to do just slightly less well than in a traditional course, but they will take it in stride — and the online option may be key to their persistence. “It’s not going to create a meltdown,” she says.

Peter Shea, associate provost of online learning at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York, worked on the national study that found higher completion rates among those who took at least one online course. He says that more national data are needed to unpack the trend.

“Common sense would say it has to do with the flexibility,” he says. “The trade-off seems to be: Yes, I am able to squeeze in participation in higher education with other competing priorities, and because I’m taxing myself in order to do both, to work and raise kids and do schoolwork all at the same time, the course-level outcomes are impacted by that.”

The day I talked to Mr. Walton, the student taking a mix of online and in-person courses, he said he was about to take an online exam. His recommendation was that students be asked to take a brief trial run — for little or no credit or cost — before taking online courses to make sure it will work for them.

In his schedule, online courses always loom — something he should be working on at any given moment. He said he’s enjoying the subject matter but will be glad when he’s done.

“My graduation party is going to be bonkers,” he said with a laugh. “If it isn’t worth it for the piece of paper, it’s going to be worth it for the party.”

Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads the Re:Learning project. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.

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