Online Learning, Offline Outcomes: Online Course-taking and High School Student Performance

This paper uses school fixed effects models to estimate differences in contemporaneous and downstream academic outcomes for students who take courses virtually and face-to-face, both for initial attempts and for students taking courses for credit recovery. We find that while contemporaneous outcomes are positive for virtual students in both settings, downstream outcomes vary by attempt type. For first-time course-takers, virtual course-taking is associated with decreases in the likelihood of taking and passing follow-on courses, and of a measure designed to proxy for graduation readiness. For credit recovery students, virtual course-taking is associated with increased likelihood of taking and passing follow-on courses, and of being in line for graduation. Supplemental analyses suggest that selection on unobservables would have to be substantial to render these results null.