By Joshua A. Price
As universities seek to innovate to meet the needs of different types of students, compressed courses are becoming increasingly more prevalent. Past research examines the effectiveness of compressed courses on student learning and perception of the course. Results differ between measures of learning, student perception, discipline examined, and graduate versus undergraduate courses. There are two challenges that need to be addressed when studying this topic, consistent measures of student performance and selection into compressed courses.
Several studies do use consistent measures of performance but nearly all do not account for potential selection bias. This study is able to mitigate issues of selection bias by using an administrative policy that required online courses to be offered in a compressed format. Using this exogenous variation to account for selection, the study finds that performance in a compressed course does differ in meaningful ways compared to a traditional-length course. Assessments measuring effort show that students in compressed courses perform no worse and might even exert more effort than students in a traditional-length course. However, assessments measuring master of material show that students in compressed courses perform significantly worse. A discussion is provided to explain the differential performance with a discussion for future design of compressed courses.
Presented at the Teaching for Learning (T4L) Conference, March 2022
Contributing Research Fellow: Cody Dirks
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