Volume 6, January 3, 2000

"Reassessing the Assessment of Distance Education Courses"
by Paula Szulc Dominguez, Ed.D. and Dennis Ridley, Ph.D., Christopher Newport University, T.H.E. Journal, Volume 27, Number 2, September 1999, p. 70

"A number of investigators have reported the benign and consistent finding that there is ‘no significant difference in student learning associated with the course setting." (p. 72) "Compared with the students in traditional classrooms, distance education students tend to be older and have more professional experience. They often have families and careers to juggle, and benefit from having an internal locus of control for learning." (p. 72) "…generating a profile of the ‘successful’ distance education student does not provide institutions with practical information for program improvement or refinement." (p. 72) "We propose a two-pronged shift in distance education investigations. The first shift removes the emphasis on distance education students and places it on the course itself. The second expands the scope of investigations to include distance education students’ subsequent performance in other classes." (p. 73-74) "Do online courses prepare students for advanced study as well as traditionally accepted forms of prerequisites?" (p. 74) "Using Fisher’s Exact test of significance, we found that there was no statistically significant difference in the students’ final grades." (p. 74)