Do Asynchronous Courses Work? Comparisons of Student Performance in a Multimodal Undergraduate Database Course

Abstract

Advances in digital learning technologies and connectivity tools coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic have led to increased online course offerings. As online courses gain popularity, it becomes more important to assess their efficacy in assuring student learning. In the domain of Information Systems (IS) pedagogy, the teaching of database courses is under-researched. This study employs quantitative methods to evaluate differences in academic performance between students in an on-campus modality compared to an online asynchronous offering of the same introductory undergraduate database course. In particular, we compare mean scores across the performance evaluation categories of attendance, quizzes, assignments, final exam, and cumulative final scores. Results indicate the raw mean scores for the on-campus section exceeded the online section across every category, but only assignment and attendance averages were significantly higher for the on-campus section when bootstrapped across 1000 samples. These results inform remedial measures to improve student engagement in these categories