Age, Gender, and Student Success: Mixing Face-to-Face and Online Courses in Political Science

Once on the fringes of higher education, online learning is now mainstream. Today, there are fewer entirely online or entirely face-to-face students; increasingly, college students are taking courses in a variety of instructional formats. How might this new reality of diverse modalities affect student success? Does a greater or lesser proportion of online classes in a student's course load lead to different levels of success? And how might these outcomes be conditioned by demographic variables such as age and gender? We explore these questions using data from 761 students in the Political Science Department at the University of Central Florida (UCF), a large public university. Our findings indicate that overall student success varies by the specific mix of course delivery modalities students are enrolled in and is conditioned by demographic variables. For instance, the data show that younger female students tend to do well with any mix of course modalities, but older male students are less successful as they take a greater proportion of their courses online. These results indicate that a changing academic culture regarding online education may not affect all students equally.