Are Online Courses Less Engaging than Traditional Lectures? A Comparison of Student Results from Different Presentation Formats

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

ARCH 100 is a “breadth” course, providing a social sciences credit for students from across Simon Frazier University. Fall Semester 2022, I taught sections of this course as both online asynchronous (OLA) and traditional in-class lectures. Both sections offered identical lectures and readings while employing identical multiple-choice exam formats, both written online drawing from the same question banks. Simultaneously teaching two versions of the same course provided the opportunity to compare student results using two different presentation methods, while holding most other variables constant. After teaching this course some 30 times, I expected mean class scores between 74-78 percent, typical for the class. Surprisingly, the in-person mean was 65.8 percent, compared to 73.5 percent in the OLA version. These unexpected results suggest at least three possible explanations: (1) online courses are more likely to appeal to students who are self-motivated; (2) my teaching methods were more different between the two classes than I anticipated, and (3) there was substantially more cheating involved in the OLA course than in the in-person course. I explore each of these potential (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) explanations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37750.0