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Recent discussion at Santa Fe Community College about "Distance Learning" and the development of appropriate academic Internet courses prompted me to conduct an informal experiment in my Introductory Sociology classes during the Fall semester of 1997. I selected this course for two primary reasons. First, this is a "Gordon Rule" course with a 3000 word writing requirement, and the basis for meeting this requirement was available through Prentice-Hall's "Online Study Guide." Second, I am already in the midst of converting the "Astound" based video lectures I use in this course into HTML format so that all of these visual enhancements can be available to students at any time over the Internet. Therefore, I believed that this course provided us with the best opportunity to measure the effectiveness of a highly content specific course presented on the Internet (process specific Internet courses have previously been demonstrated to be very successful).

I began this semester, as I have for the previous 15 years. At the end of the first week of classes, after every student had the opportunity to acquire their textbook, Research Manual and Video Lecture Guides from the College Bookstore, I spent a class period going over the details of the "Gordon Rule" requirement for the course. Essentially, there are three required formal papers: an 1800 word research analysis, a 600 word Quantitative Study and a 600 word Qualitative Study. After giving everyone a chance to consider these requirements, I began the next class session by asking for any questions about the written requirements for the course. After fielding a few questions from each of the three classes, I then proposed the alternative requirement, which all students could volunteer to select. This assignment would require each student to go to the "Online Study Guide" and answer all of the essay questions for each of the first 16 chapters that they were required to read during the semester (20 chapters were assigned). They were given the URL and one week to decide if they wished to volunteer for the Online essays. [The Internet address is = http://www.prenhall.com/macionis/.]

I believed that answering these essay questions would provide a suitable alternative to the strong research emphasis that I place on my course requirements and provide an appropriate optional mechanism for the traditional Extra Credit (Secondary Analysis) Study that I make available to students after they have completed their "Gordon Rule" course requirements. There were between 8 and 14 questions for each chapter, with an average of 11 questions for the 16 chapters required. Answering these essay questions would easily produce the required 3000 words for each student.

The students remaining with the Traditional assignments have the opportunity to earn a total of 500 points on their written papers: 400 points for the three required papers (at 200 for the major paper and 100 each for the two smaller papers) and and 100 points on the Extra Credit exercise. Similarly, those students electing to write the Online essays would earn up to 25 points for each chapters essay questions for each of the first 16 (out of 20) chapters that were assigned. They could also obtain extra credit for answering the questions for the final 4 chapters that were assignment.

The comparable nature of this alternative methods of meeting the "Gordon Rule" requirement for Introductory Sociology persuaded me to initiate this experiment despite my misgivings about forgoing the strong research emphasis that I place on these assignments. On the other hand, since I was the one who wrote the "Online Study Guide," I was aware of the fact that every chapter had one or two questions which were highly provocative or analytical. Since all other aspects of the course requirements were identical for both sets of students, this initial investigation focused primarily upon the performance differences of these two sets of students (the dependent variable). The control group would be the Traditional students and the experimental group would be known as the Online students.

The actual conduct of the study went very smoothly, despite the fact that it necessitated a few more grading sessions on my part (I always return graded papers the class period after I receive them). One minor glitch occurred early in the study when the Prentice-Hall Website went off-line for three days (without informing anyone; they shut down to upgrade the webpage templates, so that it responded better to student input). So I hurriedly emailed a duplicate set of essay questions to each of the Online students. From that point on, each of these students had two ways to submit their essays to me: by direct email reply or by submitting them through the "Online Study Guide."

The preliminary results of this study seem to strong favor the students who selected the Online essays. In fact, that is correct, however, a close examination of the data reveals that it is so for reasons quite different from what we initially expected. Please allow me to explain.

Among the students who finished the term, these students clearly performed better (i.e., had consistently higher grade averages) than those who elected to meet the traditional written requirements for the semester. It should also be noted that these traditional students performed at about the same level that students have usually performed in this course during the past 15 years. Table One shows a direct comparison for the Final course grades for these two groups of students. Please understand that all of the best students did not suddenly volunteer for the Online essays. There were several clearly outstanding students left in the ranks of those electing to perform the traditional assignments. Moreover, at least half of those in the Online group were assuredly not the most talented of students. At the beginning of the study, the ability levels of both groups appeared to be genuinely equal. None the less, the final grade average among the Online students was 84.33% and the final average for the Traditional students was 74.32%.

While the results from Table one significantly favor the students in the Online group, there are a number of other factors which bear upon these performances. Attendance has been consistently correlated with course grades in this sociology course. Typically speaking, the better one's attendance, in this course, the better one's grade. In this semester when many students were afflicted with the flu, Table two specifically compares the attendance ratios for these two groups. Not surprisingly, the Online essay group had substantially fewer average absences (a full one third less, 6.25 compared to 9.14) during the semester.

Because of the flu and a variety of other reasons, overall attrition (student dropout) was particularly high in my Introductory Sociology classes this semester. Of the 73 students who began the semester only 56 completed it. Table three compares the attrition rates for both groups. Those in the Online group also seemed to suffer less from attrition (20%) than the traditional students (25%).

The results of these comparisons suggest that the success of the online students may well be due more to traditional classroom variables than the initial proposition suggested. Instead of the Internet providing an alternative to the classroom setting, it may be better thought of as an addition to it. Students in the Online group dropped out less frequently and had one third fewer absences than did those in the Traditional group. One clear implication of this finding is the suggestion that these students used this performance vehicle to supplement their class efforts by doing more work out of class; thus providing indirect confirmation of the First Rule of Academic Success: "the more you study and prepare the better you will do."

Therefore it is important that we examine the other major variables involved in this study. First, we shall consider the fundamental premise of the study. Are the grades of the Online students better than the Traditional students on their required written work? Table Four compares these groups on the basis of their written requirements. The results are surprising.

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