The Effect of Time Spent Online on Student Achievement in Online Economics and Finance Courses

Abstract

This article studies the determinants of academic achievement in online courses in economics and finance. The authors use the online tracking feature in Blackboard (Campus Edition) to retrieve the real time that each student spent in the course for the entire semester and to analyze the impact of time spent online, prior grade point average (GPA), and some demographic characteristics of students on their final grades. Both time and GPA are significant determinants of the final grade: Higher GPAs and longer times spent online are associated with higher grades.

Keywords:

• academic achievement
• economics and finance education
• online learning
• time online

JEL codes:

• A20
• A22
• I21

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Alberto Dávila, William Greene, Peter Kennedy, Marie T. Mora, Teófilo Ozuna, and José A. Pagán for many insightful comments and suggestions. Four anonymous referees and Peter Kennedy provided valuable feedback that helped to improve the exposition.

Notes

1. NCES surveyed a total of 4,200 institutions in the United States (Parsad and Lewis 2008).

2. The impact of TIME on GRADE is positive and significant for all courses except one (International Finance). For this course, the coefficient for the TIME variable is positive but not statistically significant.

3. We thank Peter Kennedy for pointing out the implications of the formulation of the independent variables for the interpretation of the results.

4. We thank William Greene for his advice on the selection of the appropriate empirical model.

5. For details on the tests for detecting multicollinearity, consult Kennedy (2003, 213).

6. For further details on the partial proportional odds model and other generalized ordered model specifications, see Clogg and Shihadeh (1994), Fu (1998), and Peterson and Harrell (1990).

7. We thank an anonymous referee for suggesting that we look at the number of times a student logged into the course as a determinant of grade.