Massively open online courses (MOOCs) are in the news. The idea is intriguing: Classes taught by world-class professors from the finest schools, using technology to leverage the delivery to tens or even hundreds of thousands of students, could finally bring to academia the sort of productivity gains that every other organized sector of society has already realized. The issues raised are complex, and for those of us who care about equity, extraordinarily troubling.
Companies like Coursera, co-founded by Stanford Computer Science professor Daphne Koller, and edX, a joint venture between MIT and Harvard, are bringing top tier academic bona fides to the MOOC concept. In a recent Atlantic article, Koller likens the rapid rise of MOOCs to a tidal wave: "The tsunami is coming whether we like it or not. You can be crushed or you can surf, and it is better to surf." (McKenna, 2012) Ron Galatolo, chancellor of the San Mateo Community College District was recently quoted in the Oakland Tribune, saying "I think this is the single most transformational thing that could occur in higher education in decades." (Murphy, 2013) Even the California legislature is weighing in, with Democratic State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg proposing a bill that would require public colleges and universities, including community colleges, to grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by entities other than the colleges themselves. (Rivard, 2013) With approval for credit recently recommended by the American Council on Education for five Coursera classes (Kolowich, 2013), pressure continues to mount for community colleges to adopt this approach for at least some courses.
Here's the problem: The success rate in these courses is lousy. In a recent quarter, Coursera enrolled 104,000 students in a robotics class, and only 13,000 of them earned a certificate of completion (McKenna, 2012) While getting 13,000 students through a single class is no mean feat, we need to question which 13,000 students it was. My own research would suggest that the 90% or so of students who fail these courses are the same, subordinated student groups who pay the highest penalty for choosing the online section of a community college course, over an equivalent face-to-face section.
In 2011, I did a statistical analysis of the grades earned by Latino and White California community college students who had a choice of online or face-to-face sections of their course, in the semester they were enrolled, and at the school they attended. Between May 2005 and July 2009, there were around 4.5 million student records that met these criteria. Each record included student attributes of ethnicity, gender, and educational goal. Class attributes included transfer status, occupational classification, and basic skills status, along with a designation for online or face-to-face format. The relationship was evaluated between the dependent variable, grade earned, and independent variables descriptive of the student and of the class taken.
Overall, students who chose an online class paid a penalty for that choice, achieving poorer outcomes than their peers in face-to-face sections of the same course. When data were viewed at the aggregate level, students in online classes had success rates of 58.4%, compared to success rates of 65.6% in face-to-face classes, an online penalty of 7.2 percentage points. The average grade earned, on a 4-point scale, was 2.02, or passing, in face-to-face classes, and 1.92, or not passing, in online classes, with a minor effect size of 0.06 standard deviations (p < .001).
Latino students in California, presented with a choice between online and face-to-face sections of the same course, are about 30% less likely to enroll in the online section than are White students. Accordingly, Latino students are relatively underrepresented in online classes, while being overrepresented in face-to-face classes. This finding is consistent with the one other comprehensive study that discussed ethnicity (Jaggars & Xu, 2010), which reported that Black and Hispanic students were less likely to take an online course than were White students. Combining this skew in the ethnic composition of the different class formats, with the well-documented achievement gap between Latino and White students, has the effect of masking the online penalty for Latino and White students alike.
When the data are disaggregated, however, the online penalty is clearly revealed, along with its impact on the Latino-White achievement gap. Table 1 provides a comparison of face-to-face and online average grades, broken out by ethnicity and gender, for all goals combined. For every combination of ethnicity and gender, there is a statistically significant (p < .001) online penalty for students. Because this online penalty is minor, at 0.08 standard deviations, for White students, and moderate, at 0.13 standard deviations for Latino students, the Latino-White achievement gap, measured by average grade was exacerbated in online classes, by 44.0%, from a meaningful 0.25 standard deviations in face-to-face classes, to 0.36 standard deviations in online classes.
Table 1
Face-to-face vs. Online Average Grades, All Goals
|
|
|
Face-to-face
|
Online
|
Effect Size (SD)
|
|
|
Latino
|
1.73
|
1.58
|
-0.10*
|
|
Latino
|
Latina
|
1.87
|
1.61
|
-0.16*
|
|
|
Total Latino/a
|
1.81
|
1.60
|
-0.13*
|
|
|
Male
|
2.08
|
1.97
|
-0.07*
|
|
White
|
Female
|
2.29
|
2.13
|
-0.10*
|
|
|
Total White
|
2.19
|
2.07
|
-0.08*
|
|
|
Male
|
0.23*
|
0.31*
|
+34.8%
|
|
Latino-White Gap (SD)
|
Female
|
0.28*
|
0.40*
|
+42.9%
|
|
|
Total
|
0.25*
|
0.36*
|
+44.0%
|
n = 4,472,736; * = p < .001
When online instructors and administrators at one California community college were presented with evidence that online classes exacerbate the Latino-White achievement gap, they attributed the shortfall to student deficiencies in motivation, technology, and language. After claiming that some Latino students chose online sections because they thought the classes would be easier, one instructor added, "Motivation and willingness to 'show up' online make a huge difference." Another instructor, when asked about the success rate gap between White and Latino students, responded, "I think it probably has to do with familiarity of the technology." An administrator stated that "more White kids ... will have high speed Internet connections at home, and a lot of Latino kids may be getting on Facebook in the library, or wherever, they may not have it at home." Another administrator stated, "you've got folks that are linguistically in between two languages, and they don't know either one really well . . . so there may be technology literacy issues, but plain old literacy issues too." An instructor said, "online students need to be able to read and comprehend written text better than face-to-face students." These responses have in common the effect of blaming students, rather than institutions, for poor outcomes.
I found no evidence of deficits in technology, language, or motivation among Latino students interviewed for the study. Every participant expressed a high level of comfort with computers and the Internet, and all had been using computers since grade school or before. One student explained how she did all of her schoolwork on the computer, using "Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, the Internet, email, web browser, Facebook." Another was "always on the computer . . . comfortable with Word, Excel, Access, the Internet, shopping, social networks." Another had become active in Farmville, a computer simulation game popular on Facebook, saying "I've used a computer since I was very young, first grade." One got his first PC at age 7; another in sixth grade.
Interviews were conducted in English, and were characterized by highly articulate exchanges, demonstrating a strong command of the language. Only two students expressed the feeling that learning English as a second language had hurt them. One said, "I feel like I write better in Spanish. I would probably do better if I . . . could do [papers] in Spanish than in English." No writing samples were collected for the study, so it was not possible to assess participants' capabilities with written English.
Motivation was high among participants, who had chosen online classes because they wanted to further their education, despite personal, work, and family commitments that made it difficult to enroll in face-to-face classes. One student said, "I had to move my schedule around so that I have all online courses and have night classes and still work 8-5." Another student chose the online class "mainly because I have a baby. But I'm also working and I can't afford childcare. I work 21 hours a week."
Latino students face specific challenges navigating the North American academic environment. Male Latinos are often "policed, contained, and treated as criminal threats in ... their schools and neighborhoods." (Cammarota, 2004, p. 54) The Mexican cultural construct of educación, based on mutual respect among teachers and learners stands in
stark contrast to typical Latino student experiences in the United States (Valenzuela, 1999). As Valenzuela describes it, "Educación ... represents both means and end, such that the end-state of being bien educada/o [well educated] is accomplished through a process characterized by respectful relations." (p. 23)
Central to this approach is an understanding that teaching and learning is fundamentally a social activity. As Delpit (1995) argues, "the actual practice of good teachers of all colors typically incorporates a range of pedagogical orientations." (p. 24) In a similar vein, Bartolomé (2009) encourages teachers to move past the focus on methods and techniques, and instead asks, "Is it not merely common sense to promote approaches and strategies that respect, recognize, utilize, and build on students' existing knowledge bases?" (p. 344)
This mutually respectful, social relationship is essentially absent from our current implementation of online instruction at California's community colleges. The disaggregated outcome data revealed that our current practice, with online class sizes of 30 to 40 students, exacerbates the Latino-White achievement gap. This effect can only become more dramatic in the MOOC environment, where over 100,000 students can be enrolled in a single class.
In the excitement to adopt a new approach, with the promise for great economies of scale and unheard of efficiency, we need to be extraordinarily sensitive to the equity issues that accompany the approach. We need to be much more creative about finding ways to employ technology to close the achievement gap, rather than widen it.
