Pre-Recorded Lectures, Live Online Lectures, and Student Academic Achievement

Kien Le

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In the midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic, universities throughout the world are embracing online learning, often depending on synchronous and asynchronous digital communications. In this paper, we compare the impacts of live online (synchronous) and pre-recorded (asynchronous) lectures on student achievement using a randomized experiment. We discovered that the pre-recorded lectures reduce lower ability students' academic achievement but have no effect on higher ability students' academic achievement. In particular, being taught via the pre-recorded lectures, as opposed to the live online lectures, decreases the likelihood of answering exam questions correctly by 1.6 percentage points for students in the bottom 50th percentile of the ability distribution (measured by GPA at the beginning of the semester). Furthermore, being taught via the pre-recorded lectures in the starting weeks of the semester tend to be more harmful to students’ academic achievement, compared to the later ones. These findings have important implications for the effective design of education policies.

Keywords: Online education; Academic achievement; Pre-recorded lectures; Live online lectures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 I21 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Journal Article: Pre-Recorded Lectures, Live Online Lectures, and Student Academic Achievement (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:112171

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