April 2001 — Features
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A Comparison Between a Distance and a Traditional Graduate Accounting Class
Those researchers concluded that distance education students tended to be older and have more professional experience than did the students in traditional classrooms. (Note: Age information was not collected for the students in these two classes. However, the average age of students admitted in the fall semester of 1999 in the distance MBA program was 32 years, while the average age of those students who were admitted to the on-campus MBA program was 31.4 years.)The online students differed significantly from the in-class students regarding the number of hours of accounting completed prior to this course. The accounting hours could have been at either the undergraduate or the graduate level. This finding is not surprising. Students enrolled in the distance course were required to have at least three hours of accounting, while the students in the on-campus course had no such requirement.
Method of Analysis
One-way fixed effect analysis of variance was used in this study to determine whether the online students were different from the in-class students. The analysis of variance was applied to three demographic factors, to four class performance measures, and to four measures from student evaluations. In this study, analysis of variance allows a comparison between how much the classes differ with each other and how much the students within the classes differ.
Results
Performance Comparison
As indicated earlier, both the online and the in-class sections used the same syllabus, text, graded projects and exams. The exams and projects were used as learning outcomes assessment measures to determine the students' mastery of the course material. In accounting, outcomes assessment "provides information on the question: What has been the learning achievement produced by the intervention in meeting its particular goals?" (AAA 1993). The performance comparison, based on these measures, is the main focus of this paper.
In these measures, the only significant difference is in the performance on the pretest. The online students had a three-hour accounting prerequisite; the in-class students had no such prerequisite. Most likely, the difference in the pretest scores is due to this requirement. By the time the courses were over, the performance of the two classes was similar.
The midterm was an objective, multiple-choice exam with 50 questions. It covered the financial accounting portion of the course. For the in-class students, it was administered by the instructor during one of the two-and-a-half hour class sessions. The online students were required to have the exam proctored, within the same two and a half hour timeframe. The instructor sent the exam to the proctor chosen by the student and received the exam back directly from the proctor. Both the student and the proctor were required to sign a statement that the rules outlined were followed. Students typically chose a member of the clergy, a librarian, or someone in the human resources department at their place of employment to serve as their proctor.
