Abstract
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Enrollment in online courses has outpaced overall university enrollment for the past several years. The growth of online courses does not appear to be slowing. The purpose of this study was to compare course completion and student academic performance between online and traditional courses. Archival data from the host university student records system was collected using the Structured Query Language. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze student characteristics. Chi-square analysis was used to determine if statistically significant differences existed between students enrolled in online and traditional courses when comparing course completion and academic performance. Analysis found statistically significant differences existed in both course completion and academic performance for students enrolled in online versus traditional courses. Additional analysis indicated statistically significant differences existed in course completion by course discipline. </span></span></p>
Highlights
In the fall of 2007, more than 17.9 million students were enrolled in degree-granting, postsecondary institutions
Objective one was to determine if a statistically significant difference existed in academic performance of students enrolled in online courses compared to students enrolled in traditional courses
A chi-square analysis was performed in SPSS to determine if there was a statistically significant difference in student performance between students enrolled in online courses and students enrolled in traditional courses
Summary
In the fall of 2007, more than 17.9 million students were enrolled in degree-granting, postsecondary institutions. Of those students, more than 3.9 million were enrolled in one or more online courses. With the growth of online course enrollments, questions have been asked about course completion and student performance in online courses compared to traditional, face-toface courses. Russel (2001) compiled an annotated bibliography of 355 research reports that examined differences in student outcomes between online and traditional courses. Roach (2002) found that some institutions reported equal or higher course completion rates in online courses when compared to traditional courses.
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