Photo by Samantha Decker

Photo by Samantha Decker

The increasing reliance on online courses at California's customs colleges is contributing to the grade gap between Latino and white students, according to a recent written report that examined millions of student records.

The study, conducted by Raymond Kaupp, director of workforce development in Cabrillo College near Santa Cruz, found that while Latino students lag behind white students in the grades they get in regular courses, the gap is far wider in online courses.

Kaupp's findings cast a shadow over the impact of online courses, which have become a standard feature of campus offerings and are growing in popularity at California'south 112 customs colleges. (Run across this website on "California'southward Virtual Campus" for online courses offered at community colleges and CSU and UC campuses.)

The functioning of Latinos on online courses is especially worrisome. Almost two-thirds of college-bound Latino high school graduates kickoff their higher education at a customs higher. Because many of them work and have families, they are drawn to online courses and the flexibility they offer.

Merely Kaupp institute that Latinos in the online classes were much less likely to pass, earned lower grades, and had withdrawal rates more than than twice every bit loftier as Latinos in face-to-face sections of the aforementioned classes.

Kaupp's study, titled The Gap Between Latino and White Student Achievement in Online Classes,which Kaupp conducted for his medico of education dissertation at San Francisco Country, has been accustomed for publication in the The Periodical of Applied Research in the Community College.

The gap between white and Latino students based on average grades exists in both face-to-confront and distance learning courses. Simply the gap was 44% greater in online courses, the May 2022 study found.

"This 'online penalization' for all students, merely specially Latinos, is something that is systemic," Kaupp said. "It's (in) every community college in California."

Kaupp says the bear on of online classes is rooted in Latino attitudes toward education. "Relationships are important to Latino student learning," he said, referring to research by University of Texas Professor Angela Valenzuela, backed up by interviews he conducted with Latino community higher students as part of his written report.

Valenzuela, in her book Subtractive Learning,writes nigh how schools as caring communities—in which personal relationships with teachers and others in the school community are a core part of schoolhouse civilisation—are especially important for Latino students.  Those relationships are by the nature of online courses different from those in face-to-face ones.

In that location has been a huge increase in the number of students taking courses online in recent years. The per centum of students taking altitude learning online courses has jumped from 12 percent to 24 pct of total enrollment betwixt 2005 and 2010, according to an April, 2022 written report prepared by the California Customs Higher's Chancellor'due south Function. Over 33,000 form sections in 2009-10 were offered using the Cyberspace.

In fact, as the report noted, nigh half of the organization's community colleges offer degrees and certificates that tin be obtained exclusively through distance education, almost all of which are delivered via the Net.  At the same time, studies from states outside California indicate that the failure rates for community college students in online courses is higher than for regular courses.

Typically, online classes are delivered through a web-based course management organisation, which handles a variety of types of assignments such every bit quizzes, uncomplicated writing tasks, surveys, and discussions that are completed using a web interface.

The system also manages interactions between students and instructors. These tin include alive chat sessions, online discussion forums, and east-post. Some instructors also use text and telephone. Customs higher guidelines telephone call for "regular and effective contact" with instructors, Kaupp said, simply beyond that it is up to the individual instructor or any higher-specific guidelines.

Lake Tahoe Community Higher, for case, offers numerous online courses, including Elementary Statistics taught by math professor Larry Green. The course clarification describes all the ways students can access the material online, including online textbooks. Green delivers alive webinars twice a week and holds online role hours after each webinar, in add-on to having three regular office hours in his campus office. Students file their homework and quizzes online, but take to come up to the campus to take the mid-term and final exams. In addition, students tin can get tutoring by going to the on-campus Math Success Eye.

Kaupp says that course description sounds like an instructor who is doing all the right things to make online learning successful. However, he added, "very few instructors that I know apply the full suite of technology to communicate with students."

Several of the Latino students interviewed by Kaupp said they were disappointed with their level of communication with their online instructors.  "I feel like I don't get to know the instructor too as if I were in a classroom situation," one Latina student told him partway through the semester. "I inappreciably know what he looks like. I don't really know what he sounds like, how he lectures or anything except what is written." The online experience, she said, "is but a lot of work…reading and trying to empathise all the concepts. I definitely work better being in a classroom."

Women also do worse in online courses than men, Kaupp found. Latinas' online grade grades suffered the well-nigh compared with grades Latinas received in face-to-face courses.

Kaupp'due south study relied on four.v one thousand thousand Latino and white educatee records from May 2005 to July 2009 from community colleges throughout the state. He only looked at grades from classes where students had a choice of taking face-to-face or online sections. To calculate the class gap, he assigned numerical values to grades that ranged from 0 for failing to 4 for an A.

Craig Hayward, director of Planning, Research and Knowledge Systems at Cabrillo College, did a multivariate statistical analysis of Kaupp'southward study to try to rule out other factors that might account for the difference betwixt Latino and white students.  Hayward'due south analysis validated Kaupp's findings that ethnicity and gender both had an issue on online course success, fifty-fifty after taking into account other factors such as age and economic status.

Willard Hom, director of Research, Analysis & Accountability at the California Community Colleges, called Kaupp's study "a welcome effort."  "Too little data collection and analysis have been done on this topic," Hom said. Kaupp's analysis "contributes in a very important way because state officials accept had no resource with which to do a field study on the policy question of pupil interaction with online modes."  Merely he  cautioned that information technology can be risky to generalize from a single written report. "Additional studies of this topic will exist necessary for policymakers to gain confidence in these findings," he said.

Equally EdSource noted in a previous mail service, the Fresno Unified School Commune also grappled with this problem at a K-12 level when it offered online courses to high school students who oft failed to complete their work when left to do it on their ain. When the district decided to crave students to take their courses in a classroom with a teacher available to answer their questions, their success rate increased dramatically.

Nonetheless, this arroyo won't piece of work also for community college students whose schedules brand information technology more hard if not impossible for them to be in a classroom during regular normal schoolhouse hours.

Kaupp, however, believes that it is possible to develop positive teacher-student relationships even in online courses. "The institutional approach is to say that the students lack motivation, familiarity with technology, or English language language skills," he said. However, Kaupp found that at to the lowest degree the students he interviewed were motivated, comfortable with computers, and fluent in English language. Students, who accept grown up with the applied science, know how to nurture online relationships, he said. "I'one thousand not sure all teachers do."

Kaupp said instructors might be treating online courses in a similar way as contiguous courses instead of adjusting to the technology. "Having a educatee wait two or 3 days for a response to a question may seem similar to a confront-to-face grade that meets in person twice per week, just information technology is completely inappropriate for an online form, where relationships rely entirely on responsive communication, mediated by technology," he said.

For more groundwork on online courses at the California Community Colleges, come across this April 2022 written report.

Also see studies from Washington State and Virginia on success rates in community college online courses.

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