Audiences and Outcomes in Online and Traditional American Government Classes Revisited

Abstract

In 1997 we first offered American government classes online as well as face-toface classes. We administered pre-and posttests to our students to measure their general knowledge of American government, political attitudes, demographics, and some behaviors. Following an initial report in 2001, we continued to gather data for 10 more years; this current study covers nearly 3,200 students during 13 years. We examine the sample as a whole and changes in audiences and outcomes, over time, for the two teaching formats. Although the kinds of students taking online classes have become more similar, a few differences persist. Learning outcome differences continue to be insignificant. Neither format has a clear advantage in students' changes in attitudes, but the online classes increased students' newspaper reading. Class dropout rate and faculty workload both favor face-toface classes, but flexibility in scheduling and student demand clearly favor online classes. W hen future historians study the impact of technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, they will doubtless note the sea change that occurred in how courses were taught with the emergence of the Internet. In the late 1990s, we began to explore alternative formats for delivery of our program's "bread and butter" class, American National Government. Our own motivation was more basic than using a new technology. At that time, our university, a regional campus of the state university with about 3,000 full-and part-time students, was an entirely commuter campus in a small town, and drew its students mostly from the surrounding counties. First-generation college students shared parental disdain for government and politics. They saw college mainly as a stepping stone to a good job. Because an American government course was not required for graduation for most students, we struggled to attract students. Thus, our web-delivered courses were born out of desperation as much as technological possibility.After one of us received release time to develop an online class, we conducted a pilot project in the fall of 1997 with four students. The following spring (1998), we offered the University of South Carolina Aiken's first completely web-based class. We have offered one or more American government online classes every semester since then and developed several web-based upper-level political science courses. Of course, online courses, and even entirely "virtual" universities, are now common around the world.Distance education has often been viewed with suspicion. Regardless of the method of course delivery, ". . . classroom instruction has been the standard to match." 1 Although many of our colleagues initially thought web-based teaching would lack the academic rigor of the face-to-face format, our early research helped put those fears to rest. We began to administer pre-and posttests to our students to determine their general knowledge and political attitudes when they began and completed the class. We also gathered demographic data on the studen...

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