The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog last week highlighted a new study that bolsters the notion that student learning outcomes are the same in hybrid courses as they are in a traditional classroom.

The findings come from a study released last Tuesday by Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the academic community use technology to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways.

Hybrid courses are taught partly online and partly face-to-face, and an increasing number of studies — including this one by Ithaka — reveal that students in hybrid courses learn equally as well as they do in courses that are only face-to-face.

The Ithaka study, titled Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials, finds that “students in the hybrid format ‘pay no price’ for this mode of instruction in terms of pass rates, final exam scores, and performance on a standardized assessment of statistical literacy.”

The study was conducted by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, Kelly A. Lack and Thomas I. Nygren.

Bowen told Wired Campus “[o]ne of the responses most frequently raised in efforts to experiment with [hybrid] teaching is that it will expose students to risk. The results of this study show that such worries are overblown.”