Despite the Los Angeles Harbor College student ID that proves otherwise, Citlali Gonzalez hasn’t felt like a college student.

Yes, she recently finished her associate degree in human services and, yes, she is transferring to Cal State Dominguez Hills this fall. Still, as someone who for the past year has been mostly taking online classes, college doesn’t feel like the social experience she’d imagined fresh out of high school five years ago.

Like Gonzalez, roughly half of California community college students are taking classes online — a significant shift compared to the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. While community college data shows that its students perform worse in online courses compared to in-person ones, many college officials defend the shift to online learning.

The “modality,” whether a class is in-person or online, is irrelevant, said Rebecca Ruan-O’Shaughnessy, who oversees educational services and support for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. She said what matters is “engagement” — the degree to which students interact with their peers and their professors.

Nationally, the federal government is concerned about a lack of oversight for the growing number of online courses. The California State University and University of California systems have also increased the number of online classes to varying degrees, though research on online success rates at four-year universities is limited.

In July, the U.S. Education Department proposed new rules that would call on colleges and universities to collect more data about online courses, including students’ attendance. “We have been hampered in the ability to fully understand students’ participation in distance education, account for differences in outcomes and conduct oversight, accurately measure taxpayer expenditures on distance education programs, and gauge the success of such education,” wrote the department.

The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office responded to the regulations by submitting a public comment document, saying they hope the department will consider the “new costs” to develop the infrastructure to collect the data. The UC also answered publicly, saying data collection might create “confusion and stymie the development of future online education programs.” In an email to CalMatters, the Cal State system stated they were “generally in support” of the regulations and trust that the federal department will consider the potential impact on diverse student populations juggling different responsibilities.

Meeting students ‘where they are’ means going online

For 23-year-old Gonzalez, who works 40 hours a week at her day job, the convenience of online education is paramount. “It works for my schedule,” she said, adding that it’s allowed her to make time for things that help her well-being, like Jiu Jitsu. Gonzalez said that the best professors structured their courses in bite-sized pieces by breaking up lectures into shorter videos and adding quizzes after each reading. They were also quick to respond to emails.

There are typically two kinds of online courses: synchronous classes, where the professor and students meet in real-time, and asynchronous classes, where students watch pre-recorded videos or otherwise learn independently. Community college data of the past few years shows that students in synchronous classes have consistently performed better than asynchronous ones. Historically, students in synchronous classes get more interaction with their professors and that “real-time engagement” can translate into better performance, said Ruan-O’Shaughnessy.

Nonetheless, asynchronous classes are popular among students and, according to state data, these classes outnumber synchronous ones by more than 170,000 course offerings. If students want these courses, then colleges need to “meet them where they are,” said Ruan-O’Shaughnessy — and they should do so in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the quality of their education. She and other community college leaders are pushing to expand access to online counselors, tutors, and other support systems that can serve students online, both synchronously and asynchronously.

For Amber Chiang, a communications lecturer at Cal State Bakersfield, the aspect of “engagement” is also top of mind. In the online public relations courses she teaches, she said she supplements the lack of face-to-face class time by offering synchronous online office hours and using different communication platforms, such as Slack and Discord, for students to communicate with her and with each other.

Amber Chiang works from her desk in the living room of her home in Bakersfield on Sept. 3, 2024. Chiang, a communications Lecturer at Cal State Bakersfield, has been teaching online since before the pandemic. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local

But she prefers asynchronous instruction because she said it’s more convenient for students. “It’s making it possible for them to further their careers in a way that they may not have had an opportunity to,” Chiang said.

Lower performance for Black, Hispanic students in online courses

In California’s community colleges, students who enroll in online classes skew older, according to a study by researchers at UC Davis, UC Irvine, and the University of Pennsylvania. It raises a question: are these students performing worse because class is online or because they have other family or work obligations that younger students don’t?

The study controlled for these issues, in part by looking at students who enrolled in both online and in-person classes, but found that those taking online classes, especially asynchronous ones, still performed worse. The performance gap between online and in-person courses was particularly high for Black and Hispanic students.

While Gonzalez received A’s throughout her last year taking online courses at Harbor College, she recognized the advantages of in-person instruction. She said she opted for an in-person statistics class because she knew she might struggle with an online math course.

Citlali Gonzalez checks her college emails at the dining room table at her home in Wilmington on Aug. 31, 2024. Photo by Zaydee Sanchez for CalMatters

She said attending class in person helped her focus better, and since she knew she would have questions, it was quicker to ask them directly to her professors than communicate via email. Being on campus also made it easier for her to attend tutoring sessions, which helped her master the material.

“When it comes to something that I feel was so difficult for me, I was like, I can’t do it online because I’m not going to be disciplined,” Gonzalez said.

Online success at four-year institutions is hard to define

The Cal State and UC systems have also grown their online education offerings, though there are fewer compared to the more than 1 million unique community college students each year who enroll in at least one online course. For the Fall 2024 semester, Cal State campuses enrolled more than 800,000 students in online classes – a sum which double counts students who enrolled in more than one online course – according to data provided by Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith. In the same academic year, over 100,000 undergraduate students at the UC enrolled in online courses, said Ryan King, director of communications for the UC. The UC also double counts students in its data.

Data from the Cal State system shows that students in synchronous and asynchronous online classes performed better than in-person ones in the 2023-24 academic year. However, studies looking at online learning at four-year institutions are inconclusive after considering different variables, such as the complexity of courses being offered, the instructor’s experience teaching online, and the type of students who choose to take online courses.

A 2021 study looked at students taking an economics class at a highly selective public liberal arts college in New York and found only a slight difference in grades between students who attended lectures in person and those who only accessed the lectures online. While students learning online performed slightly worse, the study recognized that since the type of student choosing online classes is so varied, “any estimated gap between the two modalities would be biased,” meaning it could be due to a student’s background or experience.

Additionally, online course offerings at the Cal State system are only slightly above their pre-pandemic numbers and have been consistently decreasing since 2021. The Cal State data is looking at a much smaller scope of students than those attending a community college.

The UC did not provide systemwide data.

Promoting online education — despite ‘messy data’

Online education isn’t new, nor are its problems. Internet-based courses began at California’s community colleges in the early 2000s and grew slowly over the following decades to the point where about 1 in 3 students were taking online courses before the onset of the pandemic. Since 2006, when the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office first collected data, students in online courses performed worse than those in person, but the gap has narrowed over time.

Still, the data is “messy,” said Alyssa Nguyen, the senior director at the Research and Planning Group for the California Community Colleges, a non-profit organization. Before the pandemic, she said there were very few synchronous classes and the data didn’t effectively track how student performance in those classes might differ from others.

Both the UC and community college systems define a course as online even if only half of the class takes place remotely. The Cal State definition leaves more room for interpretation, saying an online class is any course “that is offered via computer/internet,” Bentley-Smith said. This can include hybrid classes or classes where students meet synchronously once a week and work asynchronously for the rest of the week.

Rolin Moe is the executive director of UC Online, which supports online education at the UC. He said the pandemic helped people realize the benefits of technology in education but that “without thoughtful design,” courses ran the risk of lowering UC standards. To ensure quality, Moe said UC Online has provided more than $50 million over the course of 11 years directly to campuses to help develop online courses. UC professors also have access to experts in online course design through the UC Learning Center that assist with their technology needs.

Chiang at Cal State Bakersfield received training and a certification from Quality Matters, a nonprofit organization that provides services and resources for educators to strengthen their online courses.

Ruan O’Shaugnessy, with the community college system, said her team is working to improve the quality of its online instruction by helping professors engage students, especially in asynchronous classes. In one popular professional development program championed by the system, professors are encouraged to send individual messages to students before the semester begins and to make their lectures more interactive and accessible. In separate studies, two community colleges found that those changes can lead to an increase in the number of students who pass the course.

Michael Mogull, a math and statistics faculty member at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, said he has learned over time what best practices work for his students since he began teaching online in 2017.

Mogull’s class includes weekly discussion posts where students share what they learned in class and group quizzes where students can get together and discuss the quiz. He also uses Pronto, an educational texting app where students can reach out to each other and Mogull with any questions. The app also has a video call feature where students can create subgroups to work together.

However, Mogull has noticed some students may not be as excited for group work and are less willing to participate.

“I think students are getting more used to the online, asynchronous modality,” Mogull said. “I think it’s still up to the student to kind of decide: is this the right format for me? Like, am I self motivated enough to be doing all this stuff without the requirement of attending lectures twice a week?”

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Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

Briana Mendez-Padilla is a fellow with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.