Family Arguments: No One Wins - the ongoing debate over online vs. face-to-face education

From Inside Higher Ed's Steve Kolowich comes this story about yet another study of online versus face-to-face education.  At risk of offending federal bureaucrats (and I have friends who are federal bureaucrats), this sounds an awful lot like a bureau (Education) vs. bureau (NBER) argument.  Or, put in terms to which we can all relate - it's a family argument where no one is likely right.

So, here's the gist of the debate.  Worth a read, but I don't find anything compelling in the new paper.

News: Seed of Doubt - Inside Higher Ed

...since a Department of Education meta-analysis last summer concluded that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction,” many advocates now consider the matter closed.

Not so fast, say researchers at the National Bureau of Economic
Research.  The Education Department’s study was deeply flawed and its implications have been overblown, say the authors of a working paper released this month by the bureau.“None of the studies cited in the widely-publicized  meta-analysis released by the U.S.  Department of Education included randomly-assigned students taking a full-term course, with live versus online delivery mechanisms, in settings that could be directly compared (i.e., similar instructional
materials delivered by the same instructor),” they write. “The evidence base on the relative benefits of live versus online education is therefore tenuous at best.”

And on the other hand...a refutation of the refutation:

Barbara Means, director of the Center for Technology and Learning at SRI International and lead author of the Education Department’s meta-study, says the bureau's paper, in addition to being rife with erroneous claims, draws conclusions that are essentially irrelevant to the debate over online education.
By taking pains to isolate the online-versus-classroom variable while keeping other variables constant, Means says Rush and his collaborators miss a crucial point: that what distinguishes online education from classroom education has little to do
with the fact that one comes on a computer screen and the other does not.
That narrow distinction “is something that most people in the field of technology feel is not particularly interesting,” Means says, That that is not how online education works. To the contrary, most modern online programs expressly try to present course content in a way that is unique to the online environment. If videotaped lectures are included, they are often a small part of a larger package. “The point of using the online technology," Means say, "is to do things that you cannot do face-to-face."

For a look at the new paper by Figlio, Rush and Yin, see this link.   To see the original DOE meta-analysis, check this link.