Giving Compass' Take:

• Robert Ubell argues that online education can help low-income students succeed if it included the supports that traditional education includes: study centers, career services, healthcare services, clubs, and support for learning and other disabilities.

• How can philanthropy help increase access to support services? How can colleges better serve their low-income students?

• Read about post-secondary interventions to help low-income students succeed.

From the start, access has been the defining achievement of online learning. Or so I thought.

For a couple of decades, I championed online learning for its ability to uproot entrenched ideas in education, especially by engaging students in active learning, a pedagogical style rarely practiced on campus. But I was even more taken with digital learning’s ability to let underrepresented students leap virtually over high campus gates to earn college degrees as never before.

Then came several new studies concluding that low-income students at U.S. community colleges may not be as well served online as their residential peers. One headline in The New York Times summed-up the findings: “Online Courses Fail Those Who Need Help.”

Reading initial coverage of the research, I worried that virtual access may not be accomplishing all that was it promised. Is online the educational and economic game changer I thought it was?

So I decided to take a close look at a handful of recent studies measuring online against face-to-face at U.S. community colleges. While some showed relatively poor online results, others were not that bad. As has been common since the very first large-scale studies were reported more than ten years ago, blended models—ones that mix and match face-to-face with online—emerged with the strongest outcomes.

As I stepped back and wondered what to conclude, I realized that it’s worth focusing on one piece of the puzzle that can be overlooked: student services.

Student services on campus—study centers, career services, healthcare services, clubs and support for learning and other disabilities, among dozens of other benefits—are widely available on many campuses. But few colleges offer the same expansive attention to remote learners.

Read the full article about online education by Robert Ubell at EdSurge.