Mike Caulfield wrote a post yesterday about a new Blackboard report on design findings regarding online students. The focus of Mike’s post was that people often assume that the norm for an “online” student is taking all courses online, when in fact it is more common for students to take some courses online and some face-to-face (what Mike calls “Mixed-Course”). This distinction is important:
What shocks some people reading this, I think, is that online students would have face-to-face courses as a comparison or option, or that they would be consciously choosing between online and face-to-face in the course of a semester. But this is the norm now at state universities and community colleges; it’s only a secret to people not in those sorts of environments.
I agree that this is an important topic, so let’s look at the data in more detail (and for those wondering if you can connect to Tableau Public to edit online data visualizations while flying, the answer is yes if you’re patient). The best source of information is the IPEDS database, with the most recent data for Fall 2014. WCET put out an excellent report analyzing the distance education data in IPEDS – more on that later. Both IPEDS and WCET use the term “Some but not all” in the same manner as “Mixed-Course”. Based on overall data combining undergraduate and graduate students, Mike is right that more students are Mixed-Course than they are Fully-Online – 2.926 million vs. 2.824 million. (more…)