"Prior to the Spring 2007 semester, the instructor of the class offered students the opportunity to participate in the experiment. Of nearly 1,600 registered st

"Prior to the Spring 2007 semester, the instructor of the class offered students the opportunity to participate in the experiment. Of nearly 1,600 registered students, 327 volunteered to take part and, in return, were given a half letter boost in their grade at the end of the semester. The volunteers were randomly assigned to watching the lecture live or to watching the lecture online. Measures were taken to ensure that instruction delivery was made only in the manner in which students were randomly assigned. " This experiment, by its very design, precludes many of the largest benefits of online education. By reducing it to a matter of watching a lecture in person, or watching essentially the same lecture online, it's not surprising that the students actually in the lecture were more engaged and did better. Where online education really shines is when it enables students to get more supplementary material or more interesting material (such as podcasts for language students), or where it allows students to solidify fundamentals without embarrassment (e.g. Khan academy).