Competing hypotheses about online versus face-to-face course outcomes: Analysis leveraging the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic

Due to ethical and practical concerns, no large representative randomized controlled trials comparing outcomes in fully online versus face-to-face courses have occurred. However, the circumstances presented by the COVID-19 pandemic created a unique opportunity to explore hypotheses about the relationship between the online course medium and course outcomes. The City University of New York (CUNY) was one of the first large U.S. public universities to shift all courses completely online. This study used a dataset consisting of all courses taken by students enrolled in either fall 2019 or spring 2020 at any of the two and four-year colleges of CUNY to determine whether taking online courses affect course completion rates. Findings show that both two- and four-year colleges, students were significantly less likely to successfully complete fully online than traditional mode courses. Moreover, within the same term, students were less likely to successfully complete courses that they originally chose to take fully online than in-person, regardless of whether those courses were then subsequently taught fully online or not. Students were also significantly more likely to take elective courses fully online and significantly more likely to take major requirements as traditional courses; they were roughly equally likely to take distributional requirements as fully online or traditional courses. Courses that were either elective or distributional requirements had significantly lower rates of successful completion than major requirement courses.