Despite the Los Angeles Harbor College student ID that proves otherwise, Citlali Gonzalez hasn’t felt like a college student.
Yes, she recently finished her associate degree in human services and, yes, she is transferring to Cal State Dominguez Hills this fall. Still, as someone who for the past year has been mostly taking online classes, college doesn’t feel like the social experience she’d imagined fresh out of high school five years ago.
Like Gonzalez, roughly half of California community college students are taking classes online — a significant shift compared to the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. While community college data shows that its students perform worse in online courses compared to in-person ones, many college officials defend the shift to online learning.
The “modality,” whether a class is in-person or online, is irrelevant, said Rebecca Ruan-O’Shaughnessy, who oversees educational services and support for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. She said what matters is “engagement” — the degree to which students interact with their peers and their professors.
Nationally, the federal government is concerned about a lack of oversight for the growing number of online courses. The California State University and University of California systems have also increased the number of online classes to varying degrees, though research on online success rates at four-year universities is limited.
In July, the U.S. Education Department proposed new rules that would call on colleges and universities to collect more data about online courses, including students’ attendance. “We have been hampered in the ability to fully understand students’ participation in distance education, account for differences in outcomes and conduct oversight, accurately measure taxpayer expenditures on distance education programs, and gauge the success of such education,” wrote the department.
The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office responded to the regulations by submitting a public comment document, saying they hope the department will consider the “new costs” to develop the infrastructure to collect the data. The UC also answered publicly, saying data collection might create “confusion and stymie the development of future online education programs.” In an email to CalMatters, the Cal State system stated they were “generally in support” of the regulations and trust that the federal department will consider the potential impact on diverse student populations juggling different responsibilities.
Meeting students ‘where they are’ means going online
For 23-year-old Gonzalez, who works 40 hours a week at her day job, the convenience of online education is paramount. “It works for my schedule,” she said, adding that it’s allowed her to make time for things that help her well-being, like Jiu Jitsu. Gonzalez said that the best professors structured their courses in bite-sized pieces by breaking up lectures into shorter videos and adding quizzes after each reading. They were also quick to respond to emails.
There are typically two kinds of online courses: synchronous classes, where the professor and students meet in real-time, and asynchronous classes, where students watch pre-recorded videos or otherwise learn independently. Community college data of the past few years shows that students in synchronous classes have consistently performed better than asynchronous ones. Historically, students in synchronous classes get more interaction with their professors and that “real-time engagement” can translate into better performance, said Ruan-O’Shaughnessy.
Nonetheless, asynchronous classes are popular among students and, according to state data, these classes outnumber synchronous ones by more than 170,000 course offerings. If students want these courses, then colleges need to “meet them where they are,” said Ruan-O’Shaughnessy — and they should do so in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the quality of their education. She and other community college leaders are pushing to expand access to online counselors, tutors, and other support systems that can serve students online, both synchronously and asynchronously.
For Amber Chiang, a communications lecturer at Cal State Bakersfield, the aspect of “engagement” is also top of mind. In the online public relations courses she teaches, she said she supplements the lack of face-to-face class time by offering synchronous online office hours and using different communication platforms, such as Slack and Discord, for students to communicate with her and with each other.
But she prefers asynchronous instruction because she said it’s more convenient for students. “It’s making it possible for them to further their careers in a way that they may not have had an opportunity to,” Chiang said.
Lower performance for Black, Hispanic students in online courses
In California’s community colleges, students who enroll in online classes skew older, according to a study by researchers at UC Davis, UC Irvine, and the University of Pennsylvania. It raises a question: are these students performing worse because class is online or because they have other family or work obligations that younger students don’t?
The study controlled for these issues, in part by looking at students who enrolled in both online and in-person classes, but found that those taking online classes, especially asynchronous ones, still performed worse. The performance gap between online and in-person courses was particularly high for Black and Hispanic students.
While Gonzalez received A’s throughout her last year taking online courses at Harbor College, she recognized the advantages of in-person instruction. She said she opted for an in-person statistics class because she knew she might struggle with an online math course.
She said attending class in person helped her focus better, and since she knew she would have questions, it was quicker to ask them directly to her professors than communicate via email. Being on campus also made it easier for her to attend tutoring sessions, which helped her master the material.
“When it comes to something that I feel was so difficult for me, I was like, I can’t do it online because I’m not going to be disciplined,” Gonzalez said.
Online success at four-year institutions is hard to define
The Cal State and UC systems have also grown their online education offerings, though there are fewer compared to the more than 1 million unique community college students each year who enroll in at least one online course. For the Fall 2024 semester, Cal State campuses enrolled more than 800,000 students in online classes – a sum which double counts students who enrolled in more than one online course – according to data provided by Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith. In the same academic year, over 100,000 undergraduate students at the UC enrolled in online courses, said Ryan King, director of communications for the UC. The UC also double counts students in its data.
Data from the Cal State system shows that students in synchronous and asynchronous online classes performed better than in-person ones in the 2023-24 academic year. However, studies looking at online learning at four-year institutions are inconclusive after considering different variables, such as the complexity of courses being offered, the instructor’s experience teaching online, and the type of students who choose to take online courses.
This story originally appeared in CalMatters.