Added Professor Xu: “The shift to remote instruction because of the pandemic was accompanied by so many other things that changed at the same time. It’s really difficult to tease out the impact of instruction.”
Online higher education also took so many forms — from professors lecturing over Zoom to sophisticated multimedia courses developed by professional instructional designers — that it’s hard to generalize about.
“The variability is massive,” Mr. Seaman said. “I just see too many people lumping all of this stuff together, and you can’t do that.”
But Dr. Shankar said all of those varieties of online learning offer more, not less, opportunity for study. “That would be another gold mine of evidence,” she said: “not just online versus traditional, but also within online what works and what doesn’t.
One finding that has emerged from the pandemic could have the greatest effect of all on online higher education: Nearly half of employers said their opinion of the quality of online credentials has improved, according to a survey by the Northeastern University Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy. Still, since so many students who participated in it haven’t yet applied for jobs or even graduated, conclusively measuring the effectiveness of online learning will take time. The academic semester now underway, researchers say, is a first test of new methods and acceptance.
“It’s going to take years for us to really be able to see, out of the things coming out of the pandemic, what works well, what works well in some settings and what works well for some students and not for others,” Professor Hart said.
Jon Marcus has written about higher education for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, US News, and The Boston Globe, among others. He is a higher education editor at The Hechinger Report and has been North America correspondent for The Times (U.K.) Higher Education Magazine, and former editor in chief of Boston Magazine.
