Research Highlights Featured Chart

September 18, 2024

Remote learning

How does online learning compare to in-person learning at the college level?

Tyler Smith

Source: Rido81

Recent research has highlighted the detrimental effects of online learning for young students, but at the college level, little evidence exists as to whether online instruction is as effective as the educational experience of being in-person in a classroom.

In a paper in the American Economic Review: Insights, authors Michael S. Kofoed, Lucas Gebhart, Dallas Gilmore, and Ryan Moschitto present the results of an experimental setting for an introductory college course and find that online learning reduced final scores by half a letter grade.

In the fall 2020 semester, the US Military Academy at West Point switched some students to online instruction to help slow the spread of COVID-19. At that time, the researchers set up an experiment to compare performance outcomes by randomly assigning 551 students across 12 instructors in 36 class sections of a required Principles of Economics course. By comparing the students assigned to in-person sections with those assigned to online sections, they were able to isolate the impact of online instruction.

Figure 2 from the authors’ paper shows the cumulative distribution of final course grades of the two groups.

Figure 2 from Kofoed et al. (2024)

The solid black line represents the performance  of students attending in-person sections, and the dotted gray line represents the performance of those attending online sections. 

The chart shows that at every point on the distribution, the in-person students outperformed their online peers. Students at the very bottom of the grade distribution had similar results, but a gap between online and in-person sections begins to open up among students who received a C-. The gap peaks around the median, then narrows as student performance increases. Overall, online education lowered final grades by 0.215 standard deviations.

While remote learning has the potential to make college more accessible, the authors’ results show that online offerings are not always in a student’s best interest.