67A-3 |
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J. C. ALLEN and H. Hickman. Dept. of Food Science, North Carolina State Univ., Schaub Hall, Box 7624, Raleigh, NC 27695-7624 Students often have health problems, time conflicts, long commutes and work-study programs that prevent them from attending classes regularly. Experience with teaching an early morning class in Nutrition showed that some students could miss many classes, but still keep up with the course reading, lecture notes, assignments and exams. This led to development of a totally on-line course with the same content based on lecture notes, weekly assignment pages, on-line quizzes and a very thorough and self-explanatory textbook. The objective of this study was to evaluate the relative performance of students completing an advanced nutrition survey course via distance education (DE) with those completing the course in a face-to-face format (FF). Similar quizzes were given bi-weekly in the FF course and weekly in the DE course for 2 years. A common final exam was used to compare learning. The year-2 exam included questions on a chapter not assigned to the DE students. DE students scored higher on weekly quizzes because they were open-book and time was unlimited. The percentage of DE students who did not complete the self-paced course within the semester and who required an incomplete grade was higher than for FF students. Mean final exam grades did not differ between formats, but differed between the two years of the study. Coefficient of variation for exam scores in both formats was high (14.9%). Performance on questions from a chapter not specifically assigned to DE students did not differ from the FF students. Examples of students served by the DE class include students on active military duty or co-op leave, with course conflicts or small children at home, county extension personnel, paraplegic students, and beginning graduate students with limited previous exposure to nutrition. This group had greater variability in age and academic experience than the face-to-face classes, but similar performance.
Session 67A, Education: General
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