Is Online Education Working?

This paper examines the effect of instruction modality on student learning outcomes, with a particular emphasis on the disparities observed before and after the pandemic. The analysis uses administrative data from a public university that spans seven pre-pandemic and five post-pandemic semesters in a research design that controls for endogenous sorting into instruction modality at the student, instructor, and course levels using fixed effects. The findings show that face-to-face (FtF) instruction leads to better student performance in the courses, i.e., higher grades, a greater likelihood of receiving a passing grade and achieving a grade of A, and a lower tendency to withdraw from the course. Consistent with this finding, students who have had greater exposure to FtF instruction have a lower likelihood of course repetition, a higher probability of graduating on time, and achieving a higher graduation GPA. The findings further reveal that these differences have been decreasing over time, and the post-pandemic differences are much smaller. The results are largely consistent across students and instructors with different characteristics and subject areas, except for students in the Honors program and graduate students, where the FtF advantage is either smaller or statistically insignificant.