Knowledge retention, student learning, and blended course work: Evidence from principles of economics courses

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been a large increase in the number of colleges and universities that offer fully online courses and blended courses (courses with a face‐to‐face component and with an online component). The number of students enrolling in these courses has also increased. These courses are less costly for universities to offer and provide students with more flexibility than traditional classes. This study examines the relationship between online learning and knowledge retention in introductory economics courses. Student assessment data are matched to transcript and demographic information to control for individual student attributes. Using a differences‐in‐differences matching estimator, we determine the effect online coursework has on knowledge retention by comparing performance on the assessment. Results suggest that while there is no significant difference in student learning, students in more traditional, technology‐free courses retain the material better than students.

Flipping the classroom: Old ideas, new technologies

“…Evidence that just changing the classroom is not what is required can be found in Green (2014) which suggests that merely changing the classroom to activate learning may not be beneficial. Equally, just moving the content delivery from the lecture to online may also be ineffective or even detrimental (Green, 2014;Cosgrove and Olitsky, 2015).…”

Distance Professional Training of Undergraduate Economics Students in Russia

“…Most of the prior and recent research studied as follows: 1) reasons for choosing the Economics Program distance learning (Markova et al, 2017;Horspool & Lange, 2012;Allgood et al, 2015); 2) comparison indices of online and traditional Economics students (Aljamal et al, 2015;Allgood et al, 2015;Bacolod, 2018), and 3) attitude of teachers and students to online Economics learning (Arnold, 2016;Cosgrove, 2015;Caviglia-Harris, 2016). Accordingly, in the present study, it is clarified as follows: 1) what motivates the Russian student in choosing e-learning of Economics; 2) specific features and problems of creation, presenting and use of Economics e-courses in Russia; 3) the attitudes of students and teachers to e-learning of Economics.…”

“…From the Western researchers' point of view, the use of DLS is beneficial to the university, since fully e-courses and blended courses of Economics free space in the classroom and potentially increase the flow of students (Cosgrove & Olitsky, 2015;Bosshardt & Chiang, 2018, 7). In Russia, as demonstrated in the paper, the choice of distance education is dictated by considerations of students' personalfinancial and time savings.…”

Who succeeds in distance learning? Evidence from quantile panel data estimation

“…Cosgrove and Olitsky (2015) compare outcomes for Principles of Economics students in three instruction modes: faceto-face, blended classes (which integrate face-to-face and online components), and web-enhanced. None of the sections were fully online.…”