Online Learning Efficacy Research Database

The proliferation of economics courses offered partly or completely online (Arnold Katz and William E. Becker, 1999) raises important questions about the effects of the new technologies on student learning. Do students enrolled in online courses learn more or less than students taught face-to-face? Can we identify any student characteristics, such as gender, race, ACT scores, or grade averages, that are associated with better outcomes in one technology or another? How would the online (or face-to-face) students fare if they had taken the course using the alternative technology? This paper addresses these questions using student data from our Principles of Microeconomics courses at Michigan State University. 
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The controversy over cyberlearning, as an integral part of the teaching and learning process in higher education, is growing almost as fast as the technology itself. Unfortunately, there are relatively few empirical studies that provide a comprehensive test of the effectiveness of cyberlearning. This exploratory study compares Cyberlearners with Traditional Learners in a graduate-level MBA course in introductory macroeconomics. The findings appear to provide evidence that cyberlearning can be as effective as traditional classroom learning. 
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