The Price of Flexibility? Evaluating the True Cost of Distance Education

Distance education (DE) or online education has become an integral component of community colleges’ offerings, fundamentally reshaping access and instructional delivery. A thorough understanding of the costs and cost drivers is critical for informed decision-making by institutions as they respond to this new reality. This cost analysis of DE course delivery is set in the Los Angeles Community College District. Using data provided by the district and interviews with teaching faculty, we answer two questions: What are the differences in faculty time spent in course delivery activities across different modalities? What are the differences in the total costs of delivering courses across these modalities?

We find that asynchronous classes require the most time for teaching while in-person classes take the least amount of time, even when class sizes are the same. As asynchronous sections in LACCD tend to be larger than sections in the other two modalities, this difference is expanded for faculty teaching an average-sized asynchronous section relative to in-person and synchronous sections. The modalities also differ in terms of the digital and physical resources needed to provide instruction. The non-faculty costs of in-person instruction are driven by the classroom infrastructure needed to hold the classes while non-faculty costs of synchronous and asynchronous costs are mostly driven by costs of management and quality assurance of DE. Even so, the non-faculty costs of instruction across modalities are much smaller than the costs of faculty time, which is not surprising given the labor-intensive nature of teaching. We find that if DE courses follow the same organizing principles and structures as in-person courses, they are unlikely to benefit from the cost-reduction possible through technology-assisted scaling.