Here’s an article from Chief Learning Officer. There’s not enough information about the research to make an informed judgement of the validity of the findings, but it is interesting none-the-less.

The main thrust of the article is that online courses and face-to-face courses produce similar results. However, they found that online courses are not the “easy” option that they have been accused of being.

This would be no surprise for those of us who teach online courses and it would probably be no surprise for our students either. I’ve often heard complaints that my course required too much time. In all honesty, it probably does for people without a comfort with the technologies and the basic theories of language learning (teaching). The latter is an issue in all courses at this level.