Enhancing online learning through technology: A case study in principles of microeconomics at CCSU

The rapid growth of information technology in the last few decades has had a dramatic impact on higher education. Online classes are offered at most US institutions, and some programs are offered entirely online. However recent case studies that compare outcomes of students in on-the-ground classes to those taking the same course online found that those students in the online courses performed significantly worse, and that underclassmen (freshman and sophomores) were more at risk of underperforming. This should be concerning to economics departments that are offering more and more of their principles courses online. These courses are often the foundation of student’s economic knowledge and are an integral first-step in a student’s economics coursework. Any reduction in performance and knowledge retention in these classes due to online instruction would be concerning. This research seeks to understand how the availability of recorded lectures enhances student outcomes in an Online Principles of Macroeconomics course at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU). This paper uses a panel of 100 students enrolled in an online version of the school’s principles of microeconomics course. These students completed 11 individual units where each student had access to (1) a chapter in a textbook, (2) a Powerpoint lecture annotated with notes and (3) a video lecture recording using the application Explain Everything, where the professor narrated the Powerpoint lecture and was able to utilize the app’s technology to enhance the Powerpoints using writing, graphing, and verbal explanations. At the end of each unit, the students would take an online quiz. Using Blackboard, the instructor was able to track how each student interacted with the course materials. Controlling for individual student characteristics such as gender, scholastic aptitude test (SAT) scores, race and ethnicity, and grade point average (GPA), this paper uses regression analysis to study the impact the use of recorded lectures had on the student’s performance on the end-of-unit quizzes. Several regression analyses, such as ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed-effects, and probit models, will be used to determine whether the students grade is correlated with their use of the recorded Powerpoints. Given the feedback from students in the course, as well as the findings of current pedagogy research, we expect that the use of these recordings will have a positive and significant impact on student performance.