What happens after the online course ends?

Online student performance in subsequent campus-based courses

Paula Szulc Dominguez, Ed.D.
Dennis R. Ridley, Ph.D.
Christopher Newport University

Introduction
Developing the Research Question
Methods and Findings
Conclusion
References
Contacts

Introduction

Christopher Newport University (CNU) has offered its students online courses since the early 1990s. The online courses originated through the efforts of a single faculty member from one department who used a bulletin board to support class discussions and assignments. Over the course of 18 months, faculty members in other departments became attracted to the idea of teaching online and began offering additional courses. In 1994, a cadre of online faculty members lobbied for and received funding from the Virginia General Assembly to support a two-year pilot online program at the university.

To meet legislative funding requirements, CNU was required to provide evidence that the students participating in online courses demonstrated learning outcomes equivalent to student learning that occurred in traditional, campus-based courses. During the two-year pilot stage, CNU collected a variety of qualitative and quantitative data to assess student learning outcomes. In 1996, CNU submitted a final report to the General Assembly stating that, indeed, online students performed at least as well as students in traditional courses, and that online instructors considered their courses to be at least as intellectually rigorous as campus-based counterparts.

With the educational quality of its online courses documented, CNU began operating CNU Online, a program independent of any particular departmental sponsorship, in 1996. Since 1996, CNU Online has witnessed an increase each semester in the number of online enrollments and in the number of online courses offered. At the time this paper was written--in the midst of the Spring 1999 semester--CNU Online included 1063 enrollments in 52 courses. CNU Online also offers two complete degree programs, a bachelor of science degree in Government and Public Administration, and a bachelor of arts degree in Philosophy and Religious Studies.

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Developing the research question

Establishing that online education is as educationally sound as traditional courses is an important and requisite step to creating a distance education program. But as a distance education program evolves and as each semester brings a new wave of data into an institution, the kind of questions a university can pose also changes. At CNU, we have noticed that many of our online students alternate between online and traditional courses. That is, there is no distinct "online student" group at CNU. Instead, the great majority of CNU's online students (88%) live within commuting distance to campus and combine online and traditional courses during their college careers. Many of our online courses are 100- and 200-level courses that act as prerequisites for more advanced study. Although some advanced courses are available online, many are only offered in traditional instructional settings. Therefore, CNU houses a body of students for whom the prerequisite course was taken online while the advanced course was taken on campus. This situation allowed CNU to consider how well our online students perform in traditional courses that build on information encountered in the online course. We wondered if online students would be at a disadvantage in traditional courses, compared with classmates who had taken the prerequisite through traditional means (for our purposes "traditional" forms of prerequisites included CNU on-campus courses, courses transferred in from another college or a community college, or credit given for performance on an examination). Our concern was that if the online students did not perform at least as well as classmates who had taken traditional versions of the prerequisites, then two potentially serious scenarios might exist. First, it might be that the online courses were not conveying the information necessary for preparation for more advanced study, which could be remedied fairly easily by changes in the course content. Alternatively, it might be that online students might be at a disadvantage because of the format of the course itself. That is, perhaps the content of an online course does not have "staying power" with students, and students are therefore not able to call upon this knowledge in subsequent academic settings. This alternative would not bode well for the expansion of distance education at CNU and, perhaps, elsewhere. If, however, online students did as well as their classmates from traditional prerequisites, then the online program as a whole could rest assured that online students were being prepared for advanced academic study. To shed light on this issue, we focused our attention on the relationship between student performance in prerequisite courses (online versus traditional) and advanced courses (traditional) at CNU, and relied on methods employed in previous studies of college transfer (e.g., Quanty et al., 1998).

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Methods and findings

A single question guided our study: Do online courses prepare students for advanced study at least as well as traditionally accepted forms of prerequisites? We began by reviewing the enrollment records from six departments at CNU that offer a majority of the lower level online courses. We examined a total of nine courses offered between one and four times each, between the Fall 1994 and Spring 1998 semesters. We traced all the online students' course of study after their participation in the lower level online course to see whether they went on to enroll in a traditional advanced course. Using this approach, we located a total of 44 enrollments for whom the online course acted as a prerequisite for a traditionally offered advanced course.

To determine whether the online courses had prepared these students as well as the traditional prerequisite courses, we compared their final grades with the grades of their classmates in the advanced course (Table 1). We operationalized student success as achieving a grade of a C or higher, and compared the proportion of students who had received a C or higher through traditional and online prerequisites. Using Fisher's Exact Test of significance, we found that there was no statistically significant difference in the students' final grades (p = .19). Based on this finding, we concluded that the online courses we examined prepared students for advanced study at least as well as the traditionally accepted forms of prerequisites at CNU.

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Table 1: Final grades of students in advanced courses who took the prerequisite either through traditional or online means.

Conclusion

When it comes to assessment, evaluation, and research, distance education programs typically focus on student performance in the here-and-now of the distance education setting for a particular semester. Investigators seldom consider how well distance education students perform on tests, exams, and assignments that build on the knowledge the students gleaned through their non-traditional study. An initial examination of the data collected at Christopher Newport University indicates that online students take with them the information they obtained in their online study, and successfully apply it to subsequent advanced courses to the same extent as students in traditional settings. Although our data are few at this point--despite the hundreds of online enrollments CNU has hosted since the early 1990s, we were only able to locate 44 cases that fell within the parameters defined by our research question--we are optimistic that future research will continue to support the academic quality of our online courses. It is our hope that if other institutions employ a similar strategy as they consider student performance, a more elaborate dialogue on distance education can proceed.

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References

1. Quanty, M.B., Dixon, R.W., & Ridley, D. (1998). Community college strategies: A new paradigm for evaluating transfer success. Assessment update, vol. 10, no. 2, March/April.

Contacts: 

Paula Szulc Dominguez, Ed.D.
Dennis R. Ridley, Ph.D.
Christopher Newport University
1 University Place
Newport News, VA 23606