Improving Student Engagement and Achievement in Online Learning Settings

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Online learning has become a central feature of the American education system and has expanded at an especially rapid pace in high schools and community colleges. Yet persistent concerns about student engagement, learning quality, and equitable outcomes remain. This panel brings together three studies that examine the implementation and effects of online learning across institutional contexts, using complementary methods that illuminate variation in implementation and investigate challenges and promising solutions for improving online course delivery.

Two papers address the growing and evolving use of online credit recovery (OCR) in K–12 settings, where students recover credits from previously failed courses that are required for graduation, often through asynchronous online platforms. Despite evidence that OCR increases graduation rates, most studies find null or negative associations with student test scores, raising questions about whether credits are being earned at the expense of genuine learning. The first paper draws on school district and vendor administrative data to examine variation in OCR use and intensity, how OCR initiation shapes students' longer-term educational trajectories, and which implementation models show the most promise. This study aims to generate actionable knowledge that can help districts reduce harmful uses of OCR while improving outcomes for students who need it most.

The second paper takes a deeper look at OCR policy implementation in a large, diverse school district operating under a site-based management model, where individual schools exercise substantial autonomy over OCR enrollment and administration. Using an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design — combining school leaders interviews, platform data, and district administrative records spanning nearly a decade — the study finds striking variation across schools in how OCR is structured, who is enrolled, and when and how students complete coursework. The quantitative analyses reveal that these implementation choices have measurable consequences: scheduling OCR courses in dedicated blocks during the school day is associated with higher student engagement, while relying on after-school time is associated with lower attendance and graduation rates over time. These findings recast OCR learning as a policy design problem, with scheduling, course constraints, staffing, and monitoring as potentially significant levers for improving student outcomes.

The third paper shifts the focus to community college, where distance education enrollment has grown rapidly and concerns about lower persistence and pass rates relative to in-person instruction are well documented. This study tests a structured peer interaction intervention, i.e., "study-together groups," in four fully online, asynchronous community college courses. Using a difference-in-differences design and a multi-institution comparison sample, the study finds that assignment to small peer groups meeting weekly via Zoom or Discord significantly increased both course persistence and pass rates. These findings are notable given that community college students are often academically underprepared and face disproportionately high dropout risk.

Together, the panel papers generate critical knowledge and insights for practitioners and policymakers working to expand access to high-quality online learning across educational levels, and they converge on a key, shared insight: online education outcomes depend less on the technology itself than on the institutional and pedagogical choices surrounding its use.

Policy Area

• Education

Chair

• Michael Stephens Kofoed, University of Tennessee (Knoxville)

Discussant

• Jialing Wu, The Ohio State University

Organizer

• Carolyn J. Heinrich, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Beyond the log-in: Improving student engagement and learning in online credit recovery - Presenting Author: Carolyn J. Heinrich, Vanderbilt University

• Policy, Implementation, and Associated Outcomes: The Case of Online Credit Recovery in High Schools - Presenting Author: Samantha Viano, Johns Hopkins University

• Studying Together, Staying Enrolled: Evidence From a Peer-Interaction Intervention in Community College Online Courses - Presenting Author: Jenny Lee, University of California, Irvine