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This study compares the achievement of students enrolled in two sections of a course on teaching English to speakers of other languages (ESOL), one taught in a classroom setting and the other offered online. Participants included 29 students enrolled in the online section and 31 students in the classroom section. Students in the online section of the course scored significantly lower than students in the classroom-based course on a pretest. A t-test of student achievement on a posttest showed no significant difference in achievement among students enrolled in the two sections of the course. Numerically speaking, however, students in the classroom-based section as a group scored 13.19 points higher on the posttest than they did on the pretest. For the online group, the improvement in average score from pretest to posttest was 15.21 points. This finding suggests that students in the online section of the course achieved more than their classroom-based counterparts.
Thirunarayanan et al. (Sat,) studied this question.