Report on a study conducted at 34 community colleges in Illinois on the cost and returns oon online learning. According to the author, "online programs at 83% of the community colleges participating in the study were not cost efficient and did not provide a positive return on investment." As he notes, "These findings are not consistent with the literature." Surprisingly, development costs were not found to be the major issue: "cost of instruction was found to be the most significant cost factor." Moreover, "larger enrollments would have created conditions in which technology-mediated delivery would be less expensive and that continued effort must be made to identify those conditions." These results are not surprising, since most online learning efforts to date amount to online versions of offline classes. That said, one wonders what the ROI would have looked like had student costs and returns been included in the calculation.
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