No Significant Difference

For the No Significant Difference and Media Debate article, I chose Effective Student Outcomes: A Comparison of Online and Face-to-Face Delivery Modes by Jane M. Carey (http://www.ed.psu.edu/acsde/deos/deosnews/deosnews11_9.asp). The article compares learning by asynchronous web based classes and synchronous face-to-face. I found the article to be well written from it's first sentence of the introduction, "A myriad of studies have concluded that there is no significant difference in the learning outcomes of online students and face-to-face students" for which Carey cites multiple authors (Russell 1999; Barry and Runyan 1995; Cheng, Lehman, and Armstrong 1991; Martin and Rainey 1993; Moore et al. 1990), to Carey's lack of ego in realizing that so many others have written similar ideas and she is only adding her feeling to the fray.

Carey like her predecessors found that through her studies there was no significant difference in learning from a face-to-face encounter versus an online class. She bases her findings on outcome measures that include gain scores (difference between pretest and posttest knowledge), grade expressed as a percentage, and student satisfaction as demonstrated by a course in management information systems.