Comparing costs of online vs f2f credit recovery
The last blog post reviewed several briefs from the American Institutes for Research that explored online credit recovery. The AIR study found that, overall, outcomes were about the same in the online and f2f credit recovery courses.
The study also includes a brief that merits its own post, because it reviews a topic that receives less attention: the comparative costs of the online vs f2f courses, including not only cash outlays but also the in-house resources that each used.
First, here are the three main findings:
“Overall, the online Algebra 1 classes cost about the same per student as the teacher-directed classes; the overall cost was $28 more, but this difference was not statistically significant. The overall cost of the online English 9 classes was approximately $47 less per student than the teacher-directed classes.
If one looks only at costs incurred by the district, the online Algebra 1 and English 9 classes cost the district more than the teacher-directed classes. The higher cost is primarily due to purchasing the online curriculum for the online classes.
The amount of time teachers spent outside of class on lesson planning, grading, and developing class materials was lower for the online classes than the teacher-directed classes. This reduced the overall costs for the online classes.”
The last two bullet points raise a critical issue when evaluating costs. Organizational leaders often look at the incremental expenditures of a program much more than they look at staff time. A program that costs less to purchase, but takes more staff time to implement, appears to be less expensive than one that may cost more to purchase, but save significant staff time. This is hardly a new concept, but remains a challenge when implementing any innovation. Even if district leaders are basing decisions based on a fuller accounting of costs, they may have a hard time convincing schools boards, policymakers, or the media of the relative merits of an innovation that saves staff time while increasing a budget line.
The AIR brief explains this concept in the context of the study:
“district-incurred costs are those that the district pays and necessitate increased spending by the district. In contrast, teacher-incurred costs are the result of additional time spent on the class by teachers beyond their contracted hours. The additional time teachers spend outside their contracted hours does not increase district spending on credit recovery courses, but it represents an opportunity cost to the teachers. In other words, the teachers could have used that time doing something else of value.”
Clarifying the savings from online courses further:
“The online classes for both subjects resulted in lower teacher-incurred costs. This was because teachers spent less outside-of-class time on grading, developing lesson plans, and developing curricular materials in the online classes. The platform itself performed many of those tasks.”
This last point is particularly valuable. It’s well understood that online courses, content, and platforms can reduce teacher effort, but there have been few studies that looked closely at these variables. This research provides valuable data on these topics, as presented in this figure:
Source: Online Credit Recovery: Resources and Costs, American Institutes for Research, October 2020
In summary (emphasis added):
“We found that providing online credit recovery courses cost the district more, primarily because it required the added cost of the online curriculum and the additional cost of computers. However, we also found that online courses result in less cost to teachers because teachers devote less time outside of class for lesson planning, grading, and developing course materials…”
“English courses [had] a lower overall average cost of the online course compared with the teacher-directed course..”
For Algebra courses..the overall average cost of the online and teacher-directed courses [was] comparable.”
Although $28 and $47 may not sound like very much money in a context where student funding averages over $10,000 per year, these numbers are a high percentage of the cost of delivering credit recovery. The study shows the cost per student for each type of course (Algebra, English, online, and f2f) as ranging between $299 and $370. Therefore, the cost savings are in the neighborhood of 10%, which is a non-trivial amount, particularly as education budgets are likely to be constrained as state economies and spending are reduced by COVID-19.