Do Online Students Perform Better than Face-to-face Students? Reflections and a Short Review of some Empirical Findings

Johan Lundberg, David Castillo Merino and Mounir Dahmani

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The increases in the number of online courses given by universities have been quite dramatic over the last couple of years. Nowadays, many universities even give complete degree programs online where instructions and lectures in the form of, for example, streaming videos, are available for students to watch 24 hours a day. In a sense, the use of Internet and Interactive Computer Technologies (ICT) in higher education can be compared to any other type of teaching tool, such as the blackboard and overhead projectors. The motivation for using the Internet and ICT in higher education, from an economic point of view, is if they are more effective as teaching tools compared to any relevant alternative. That is, all else being equal, if the Internet is an effective teaching tool in that students who attend online courses or complete degree programs perform better in terms of marks in the final exam compared to face-to-face students. In this paper we reflect on and summarize some of the empirical findings in the literature on the effects of online teaching on student performance compared to face-to-face equivalents.

Keywords: ICT uses; efficiency in higher education; literature review; student performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-04-21
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in RUSC: Universities and Knowledge Society Journal, 2008, 5 (1), pp.35-44. ⟨10.7238/rusc.v5i1.326⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03721702

DOI: 10.7238/rusc.v5i1.326

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().