A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI
International for the Department of Education, has a starchy
academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average,
students in online learning conditions performed better than
those receiving face-to-face instruction.” The report examined
the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom
teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but
most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult
continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical
training to the military. Over the 12-year span, the report
found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of
online and classroom performance for the same courses. The
analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average,
students doing some or all of the course online would rank in
the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the
average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That
is a modest but statistic