I think this is pretty easy to see how we could twist this. The basic supposition is likely that the two populations differ in my experience. Online classes tend to divide into two populations, students that have to be there to make up or catch up, and students that are trying to get ahead, and usually there are more over- achievers than underachievers around a 2-1 bias i'm guessing. In my classes, there tends to be more students doing A quality work in online classes, than f2f. F2F i suspect is a more normal population. So I'd argue that the bimodality with a larger mode of overachievers in online classes versus a more normal distribution in the f2f classes, might explain this. It also explains why online classes seem to work very well for some students, usually students that are self- motivated, and in my experience, somewhat less well for students that do not have the same degree of motivation to do the work. Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Virginia Tech Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research, School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee http://wiki.tmttlt.com http://www.tmttlt.com Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student. -George Iles