WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHETHER YOU BLOW OFF A CLASS OR A VIDEO?:

With less fanfare, there is something else going on: the marriage of in-person teaching and online instruction in building-block courses such as statistics, intro physics and basic economics. In these hybrids, students meet the teacher perhaps once a week for an hour; the rest of the learning is done online.

"There's been a convergence of the power of the software with knowledge we've gained from cognitive sciences about how people learn," says William Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland, which has 12,000 students enrolled in 40 or so of these hybrid courses. "And there is the potential for cost savings. We have got to find lower-cost ways of delivering high-quality education."

Some praise technology in the classroom as a cure-all; others label it a sure way to destroy all that is good in education. There have been lots of assertions, but little evidence. Until now.

In a carefully crafted, foundation-funded experiment that has received less attention than it deserves, Ithaka S+R, a higher-education think tank, enticed 605 undergraduates at six public-university campuses in New York and Maryland to agree to be assigned randomly to one of two courses. Half took a conventional introductory statistics course that met three hours a week. The other half took a computer-assisted course that met once a week and relied on an interactive, online statistics course developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Online Learning Initiative.

To compare outcomes, researchers had students take a standardized statistics test and a final exam that had some of the same questions.

The statistically sound result: Students in the online course did just as well as those who took the conventional course. No better, no worse.

"The most important single result of our study: It calls into question the position of the skeptic who says, 'I don't want to try this because it will hurt my students,' " says one of the study's architects, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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