Last week I shared data tables for online education at US public 4-year institutions, with additional data for Florida. Now that I’m getting the process reasonably efficient for analyzing this data, there is some room for requests (hmm, slippery slope here).
https://twitter.com/econproph/status/432308481786253313
Since Jim teaches in Michigan, let’s review the 2-year data with additional data on his state.
At e-Literate we’re planning to do more data journalism posts. Think of this along the lines of Harper Reed’s keynote last year as described in the Chronicle.
Harper Reed, who served as chief technology officer in President Obama’s 2012 campaign, offered those people what he jokingly called “an intervention.”
“Big Data is bullshit,” Mr. Reed said in a keynote speech on Tuesday.
His point is not that there is no value in the large amounts of data available to the community, but that data analysis is getting democratized and doesn’t require huge investments.
“The exciting thing is you can get a lot of this stuff done just in Excel,” he said. “You don’t need these big platforms. You don’t need all this big fancy stuff. If anyone says ‘big’ in front of it, you should look at them very skeptically … You can tell charlatans when they say ‘big’ in front of everything.”
I would add one other aspect along with the democratization of data analysis – open data. Inspired by Audrey Watters and even her recent tweet, we are looking for ways to not only explore the open data available to the education community but also to share the data we use in our analyses.
https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/426541112527192064
I have written a series of posts on the new IPEDS data, including two that showed how this data seems to be quite different from the pervasive Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) data (formerly known as the Sloan Survey). In particular, there were two findings, one on the number of students taking online courses:
And no, there aren’t 7.1 million [from Babson] US higher ed students taking at least one online course. There are closer to 5.5 million [from IPEDS] as of Fall 2012.
and one on the number of institutions offering online education:
The big difference that should be obvious is that the Babson data shows less than half the number of institutions with no online offerings than the IPEDS data – 15% compared to 31%.
Who has an online offering?
I have been in contact with Jeff Seaman, one of the two authors of the BSRG reports, to get his analysis on the differences, including sharing my spreadsheets used for analysis of the two data sets. Jeff has graciously reviewed the data and provided the following analysis of why BSRG data is so different from IPEDS data.
Recently I pointed out that the widely-quoted Babson survey on online learning estimates 7.1 million US higher ed students taking at least one online course while the new IPEDS data indicates the number as 5.5 million. After looking deeper at the data, it appears that the difference in institutions (whether or not an institution offers any online courses) is even greater than the difference in students. This institutional profile is important, as the Babson report (p. 13) noted that institutions offering no online courses had very different answers than others, a theme that ran through much of the report: [emphasis added]
The results for 2013 represent a marked change from the pattern of responses observed in previous years. In the past, all institutions have consistently shown a similar pattern of change over time. Different groups of institutions typically reported the same direction of change – if one group noted an improvement on a particular index, all other groups would show a similar degree of improvement. The overall level of agreement with a particular statement might vary among different groups, but the pattern of change over time would be similar. This is not the case for 2013.
As noted above, there was a year-to-year change in the overall pattern of opinions on the strategic importance of online education, and on the relative learning outcomes of online instruction, as compared to face-to-face instruction. In both cases, the historic pattern of continued improvement took a step back for 2013, and all of the changes are accounted for in a single group of institutions: those that do not have any online offerings.
Institutions with no online offerings represent a small minority of higher education – how are they different?
Let’s look at the IPEDS data on institutions versus the Babson data, first by institutional control. I took the data on page 32 of the Babson report and recreated the graph, then I ran the same analysis using IPEDS data. (NOTE: these interactive charts do not come through on RSS feeds, so you probably will have to click through to post to see.) (more…)
Update: I should have guessed this, but the visualizations don’t come through on RSS feeds, so you’ll need to click through to the article.
Reader Mike Himmelstein has rightly pointed out that our analysis of the new IPEDS data would benefit from using visualization tools instead of just tables. This comment led me to a multi-day investigation of which data visualization tool would best integrate into a WordPress blog while maintaining interactive data exploration. I tried MicroStrategy (great tool but cannot share without login), IBM Many Eyes (good public tool but limited in formatting), and several variations of Google Charts (not as rich in features as MicroStrategy, but close, and supports public sharing). In the end I’ve ended up using the Visualizer plugin to display Google Charts. All data below is for degree-granting institutions.
Let’s first look at the state-by-state data in a Geochart. This data tracks online ed in public higher ed institutions as of Fall 2012. I’m showing the data broken out by undergraduate and graduate students. The color scale is based on the percentage of students taking at least one online course, but if you hover over a state you can also see the percentage of students taking all of their courses online.
For the basic data combining undergraduate and graduate students in a table format, see this post.
Percentage of Public Higher Ed Undergrad Students Taking Online Courses, by State
[visualizer id=”4711″]
I’ve written several posts recently looking at the new IPEDS data on distance education (for the most part equivalent to online education). In one post I pointed out [emphasis added]:
Previously, the best data available on total student counts came from the Babson Survey Research Group with their annual survey (prior to 2012 called the Sloan survey). This is the survey tracking the total number of students taking at least one course online. When I talked to the researchers earlier this year, they mentioned that they hoped the new IPEDS data would ‘put them out of business’. I hope this comment was half in jest, as their survey measures much more information than just total student counts and they have very useful longitudinal data. I have asked BSRG for an updated statement on their plans but have not been able to get a response yet.
Some additional notes on the data:
According to the IPEDS data, 5.5 million (26%) degree-seeking students in the US took at least one online course in Fall 2012, which is significantly less than that reported by Babson (6.7 million / 32% for Fall 2011 data). Keep in mind the different methodologies involved – IPEDS collects data reported directly from colleges and universities, while Babson is based on a representative survey; IPEDS measures “distance education”, while Babson measures “online courses”. I would look forward to this year’s Babson survey to explain the differences, but for now, I’ll just note the difference.
The new Babson Survey came out yesterday morning, and I was disappointed to find out that they did not address or acknowledge the differences in the data. With the new survey data (p. 15, using Fall 2012 data just like IPED), they came to a dramatically different conclusion [emphasis added]:
It’s Tuesday, so it must be time for my daily post on the new IPEDS data including online education. There are so many ways to slice this data that just was not possible before, and with a little spreadsheet engineering, I’m finding it easy to come up with new views. Today let’s look at the adoption of online education per state for public institutions (both 4-year and 2-year schools). Note that this data does not include private non-profit or for-profit institutions as I wanted to focus on official state involvement in online ed.
IPEDS tracks information now about students taking exclusively distance education courses, students taking some but not all distance education courses, and students not taking any distance education courses. Please note the following:
