Cost-Effectiveness

Abstract

Online education offers strong intrinsic potential for advancing and augmenting teaching and learning through broadening and deepening access. Proponents of online education further claim extrinsic potential – that it should be less costly and just as effective as traditional education, if not more so. They consider the instruction equally or more effective relative to such factors as the depth of course content presented, student outcomes and breadth of access (Duderstadt, 2000; Allen & Seaman, 2003; Gomory, 2001).1 Are these claims accurate? How would we gauge their accuracy? What data would we collect? How would we make sense of that data?