As a mere PhD student (our "credentials" discussion is fresh in my mind), I feel compelled to prominently proclaim that I am not speaking on behalf of my employer or colleagues but offering my own viewpoint and opinions. On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Charlie Balch<charlie@balch.org> wrote:
I'd appreciate some references regarding the comparative efficacy of F2F, Online, and hybrid instruction.
We've looked at this a few times in my shop, Indiana University's Center for Postsecondary Research. We annually administer several large scale surveys, most prominently the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), and occasionally we've focused on technology as it relates to our measures of engagement and other proxy measures of learning. We've been conducting the NSSE for 10 years now and I'm starting to compile all of our technology-related work. It seems that every time we look at this issue there is a significant positive correlation between technology use and nearly every thing we measure. Our most recent work, which I presented a few months ago at the meeting of the American Education Research Association, focused specifically on how the relative number of online courses relates to the things we measure. Even when we controlled for a bunch of things (age, gender, enrollment status, major, institution type, etc.) the same generally positive correlations remained: increased use of technology positively correlated with measures of engagement and learning. Our paper can be found at http://cpr.iub.edu/uploads/Engaging%20Online%20Learners.pdf if anyone is interested in digging into this more. But "technology is good!" isn't a very useful or nuanced finding, right? We're continuing to dig in to this more; we have another large set of data from this year's survey we're working to analyze. We asked more specific and different questions this time around so we should learn some new things. But we're also pretty limited by our methods and resources. We can make some really good generalizations with really impressive numbers of respondents but we can't ever answer the "why" and "how" questions.
I appreciate that many factors are involved and instructional efficacy is not a well defined construct.
The things in which we're all really interested are very subtle and hard to define much less measure. Many, many things are conflated and confused. And it's difficult and often irresponsible to generalize findings. Kevin