"Just the Numbers" Convening Spotlight 2024: Designing Effective Distance Education
This spotlight is part of a series examining work presented at the 2024 Strategic Data Project Convening. The theme of the convening was “Just Numbers”—celebrating the power of data and evidence in driving decisions and policies, while simultaneously challenging us to consider the deeper, ethical implications of data usage in education. Read the rest of the series here.
When COVID-19 forced daily life online, many postsecondary institutions grappled with the logistical challenges of pivoting from primarily in-person instruction to teaching in an online environment. As these urgent needs receded, student and faculty interest in online course modalities persisted, and institutions’ focus shifted to ensuring high quality learning could occur across modalities.
Looking back on the last five years, many educators are asking how the transition into an increasingly remote and hybrid world shaped the experiences, wellbeing, and academic outcomes of students and faculty.
The Leveraging Technology and Engaging Students (LTES) project—a collaborative research project conducted by the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR), and the EdPolicy Hub and Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California—is attempting to provide some answers.
The project examines how patterns of student enrollment and success have changed in LACCD, one of the largest and most diverse community college systems in the country, since the onset of the pandemic, as well as how the increase in distance education has shaped student academic outcomes, faculty and student experiences, and faculty and student wellbeing.
Through a mixed methods approach rooted in surveys, focus groups, and district administrative data, the project’s researchers have been exploring the implications of expanded distance education course offerings for faculty and student success.
Their research has several pillars, which they outlined in a recent breakout session at the Strategic Data Project’s 2024 convening:
The SDP Convening theme, “Just Numbers,” reminds us that data points in our analyses and dashboards are not "just numbers"—they are representations of real people, and while data and evidence can be powerful drivers of decisions and policies, we must simultaneously consider the deeper, ethical implications of data usage in education.
Through interviews, focus groups, and surveys of LACCD faculty and students, LTES researchers have been able to shine a light on the multi-faceted ways real people have adapted to the expansion of distance education in the district, and provide emerging evidence of best practices and next steps for practitioners.
What is “Distance Education”? Exploring Course Modalities
In LACCD, there are four distance education course types: asynchronous online, synchronous online, dual delivery/HyFlex, and hybrid/blended learning. These modalities—pictured—vary in their location (totally on campus, totally remote, or a mix of each) and their degree of live instruction (synchronous, asynchronous, or a mix of both).
Training and Preparation
While distance education, particularly asynchronous online courses, has been offered in a limited fashion for many years in LACCD, many educators and students faced a steep learning curve to teaching and learning in distance modalities at the start of the pandemic.
LACCD certified all faculty to teach distance education in a short period following campus closures. Certification requires completion of two courses, Introduction to Teaching with Canvas (ITC), the course management system used in the district, and Introduction to Online Teaching & Learning (IOTL), a class focused on best practices for highlighting and clarifying course policies, humanizing the learning environment, and improving student belonging, engagement, and success.
On a survey fielded by the LTES team, instructors reported that switching from in-person to asynchronous or hybrid modalities (as opposed to synchronous online or HyFlex modalities) required the most effort on their part, as courses needed to be completely redesigned for effectiveness in the asynchronous context.
How do faculty feel about the role of distance education in student success?
The session presenters shared that, during focus groups with faculty, the LTES team heard a great deal of concern about student success in online courses.
Faculty noted that, while distance education offers a great deal of flexibility to students to fit college into their busy lives, some students may not learn as well in distance education courses. As one tenured faculty member in Child Development shared, “I know that there are students who can do a lot of their own teaching, and they can be very successful in online. But I don’t know that that’s the majority of students that I’m personally seeing, in my classes.”
Another, a tenured faculty member in Media, Journalism, and Photography, noted the logistical challenges of distance education, which often outweighed the learning challenges: “They don’t actually fail because they don’t understand the material. They fail because they forget to actually take the quiz or do the discussion or log in.”
Beyond academic performance, faculty voiced concern that other facets of the student experience may be detrimentally impacted by distance education.
One faculty member feared that online courses may take away from the social aspect of in-person learning. “I have to remind [my students], learning happens in a social environment,” a faculty member in sociology said. “You should be interacting with each other when you’re taking [the course]... It’s mutual uplift, and mutual empowerment. And that’s if you’re engaging, and wrestling with the question together.”
Others worried that students who take most of their classes online may feel less connected to their campus. “The culture of what our college is supposed to be [is] that of engagement,” said a tenured faculty member in Child Development. “The whole essence and spirit of community colleges, I think, [is] hindered in this totally online experience. We have events here on campus, and we don’t get nearly the numbers that we used to.”
This change in the student experience was potentially supported in student survey results, too— students taking the majority of their courses online reported a lower sense of belonging than students attending primarily in-person.
Does distance education affect students’ grades?
In response to faculty concerns about student academic success in online courses, the LTES team performed initial descriptive analyses examining student grades across course modalities.1 This analysis showed that students enrolled in distance education courses do not seem to perform better or worse than their peers in in-person courses.
Among both first time in college (FTIC) and continuing students, there was no consistent advantage in terms of average annual GPA for taking most courses face-to-face. Pre-pandemic, grade distributions were similar for continuing students across face-to-face and online courses; these similarities remained post-COVID.
This result was surprising for researchers who, given prior research on online course effectiveness, anticipated that students taking most courses in-person would perform better, on average, in their coursework.
The findings drove home the value of using data to interrogate pre-conceived notions about the environments in which students will succeed— the conventional wisdom that learning operates better in person may not always hold.
How can faculty support student success?
Given their concerns about student academic performance and social connections in online courses, faculty have developed best practices for engaging students in their distance education courses.
Some of these practices, shared in faculty focus groups with the LTES team, include a focus on providing optional in-person ways to gather, encouraging on-camera participation, and using feedback on assignments to start a dialogue with students.
The Future of Course Modalities
Faculty recognize the value of continuing to provide high-quality distance education, even as they would generally recommend that students take classes in a variety of modalities. As one said, “It's so important to provide all the different modalities so that students can find the fit that they like and that works for them.”
For many, this is an equity issue. Students with farther to travel or parenting and work obligations outside of class may find it significantly easier to participate online, especially in a city known for its traffic.
There is recognition that, while the best fit for individual faculty and students may vary, the flexibility provided by distance education is critical for attracting and retaining students.
To do this work well, faculty point to the need for investment in support specific to distance education: training on engagement and pedagogy; help from instructional designers, accessibility coordinators, and IT staff; onboarding that includes technological access and Canvas templates; and the creation of peer learning spaces.
The LTES team will continue exploring these questions and providing data and evidence to inform decision-making about how best to provide faculty and students with the options and support needed to succeed. Follow along with them.
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1 The LTES team is continuing their evaluation of the impacts of online course taking on student success by moving beyond descriptive approaches to more rigorous, quasi-experimental designs that are better able to disentangle the effects of course modality from other factors drive student decisions about what modalities to enroll in as well as their academic outcomes.
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LTES—a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR, the Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD), and the EdPolicy Hub and Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California—is fully funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305X220018 to the President and Fellows of Harvard College.