Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed:  Coronavirus and the Great Online-Learning Experiment, by Jonathan Zimmerman (University of Pennsylvania):

In 1993, as Louisiana State University made its first steps toward online instruction, its student newspaper, The Daily Reveille, issued a stark warning about the future. “A university is a place where the knowledge of one generation is passed on to the next, and this cannot be done by machine,” the paper declared. “Information can be found in a computer, but only by the human touch is the knowledge of generations transmitted.”

What were they learning? It’s hard to tell. In the 1990s, the first set of studies found little difference in academic achievement between people who took face-to-face, online, and hybrid courses. But this research was marred by the problem of self-selection: Students who chose online courses were probably more comfortable in that format and tended to perform better in it. …

[W]hen students are surveyed, they point to convenience as the most positive attribute of online instruction: You can tune in at any time, sandwiching courses around work and family duties. But faculty members question whether they’re good education, and with good reason. There just isn’t enough solid evidence to know.

That brings us back to the coronavirus, which has created a set of unprecedented natural experiments. For the first time, entire student bodies have been compelled to take all of their classes online. So we can examine how they perform in these courses compared to the face-to-face kind, without worrying about the bias of self-selection.

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