Dive Summary:
- A new National Science Foundation report provides a more complete picture of this summer's San Jose State and Udacity collaboration, two weeks after the school and online learning organization released some of the highlights.
- Students’ grades in the online courses — which had been poor in the spring — did indeed improve in the summer, when the courses were offered to a student body that was better prepared, compared to a student body in the spring that had failed some of the courses already.
- The researchers found what mattered most was the students' effort: “Measures of student effort trump all other variables tested for their relationships to student success, including demographic descriptions of the students, course subject matter, and student use of support services.”
From the article:
... They go on to conclude, optimistically, that the university has learned from the spring experience: “The faculty members who taught these courses, although they had to contend with major difficulties along the way, believe that the content that has been developed has tremendous potential to advance students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving abilities.” ...
