Online Versus Face-To-Face Nutrition Courses at a Community College: A Comparative Study of Learning Outcomes

Students have been gravitating towards the Online Learning Environment (OLE). The preference for online learning models (OLM) among students has grown more rapidly than for traditional face-to-face models in community colleges in the United States of America. Research about OLMs has focused on teaching efficiency and effectiveness to support the growth of online education. Administrators and teachers have continually sought to gain more knowledge about this issue, especially with concerns regarding engagement of students in an online learning environment. Increased student dissatisfaction with online learning models, a high withdrawal rate, and inadequate student-learning outcomes are some of the factors that have contributed to this comparative analysis of online versus face-to-face learning models. Of the 541 student records collected for this post hoc study, initial analysis indicated that learning outcomes of students enrolled in an online nutrition class showed a statistically significant difference from the learning outcomes of the face-to-face section of the same class, although the difference was small