The relationship between attending a lecture in-person, synchronously online or asynchronously online and student grade

Abstract

Recently, a synchronous online education mode has been developed and extensively used: livestreams of lectures. Although the literature shows that fully online courses yield worse learning outcomes than those that have a blended format, we argue that livestreams offer the advantages of online education, while not having its drawbacks. We analyze the effects of attending a lecture synchronously online, asynchronously online, or in-person. This is studied for a large undergraduate course in which over 700 students attended and could self-select in the mode of education per lecture. This within-person variance allowed for identifying the effects of the mode of education on their performance for the section in their exam that reflected that lecture's content. No significant differences between attending a lecture synchronously online, asynchronously online, or in-person are found. This paper contributes to the literature by showing the efficacy of a multimodal setup for a course.