Found
this opinion piece in the New York Times:
The research has shown over and over again that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still, low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses.
Some of the online courses my son has taken have been fantastic. They include classes where there was a lot of instructor time and enrollment was on the low side. So, CTY essay writing classes, EPGY English, and AoPS fit this bill. That said, he's doing a self-paced CTY Java course and is learning a lot in spite of relatively low instructor time.
Alternatively, he's doing a self-paced physics course at the University of Missouri High School this semester. He'd probably be lost without me. Example: an early exercise gave him data for a ball rolling in a straight line with constant acceleration. He was supposed to plot the data. Turned out that the constantly accelerating ball stopped for a couple seconds, reversed course, and then continued on its way as though nothing had ever been amiss.
I wrote to the guy who developed the course, and he replied "I wrote the course several years ago and I am no longer associated with it. The data is actual data generated in a lab, not perfect data predicted mathematically." Uh-huh. I did this experiment in school, and I don't remember the ball stopping, reversing course, and then magically regaining its lost acceleration.
My son would have been completely confused if I hadn't been able to explain things to him. I wonder how many students out there don't have access to someone who can a) recognize errors like this and b) explain them.
