SYNCHONOUS AND ASYNCHONOUS COMMUNICATION: A DETERMINING FACTOR IN THE GAP BETWEEN THE TEACHING ONLINE AND TRADITIONAL STATISTICS

摘要

The purpose of this study was to compare the academic performance of online courses in statistics with traditionalcourses in statistic for MBA students at a private university in Puerto Rico. The research utilized an experimentalstudy design for two groups, where a t test statistical analysis was used, with a 99% level of confidence. The populationof the study was composed of 47 students, of which 20 were from the control group and 27 were from the experimentalgroup. Students in the experimental group were exposed to the online courses through the platform BlackboardCollaborate, which incorporated asynchronous communication, synchronous communication, and virtual classrooms.Students in the control group were taught the equivalent statistic courses through the traditional face-to-faceclassroom method. The content for both groups were: Data Types, Measures of Central Tendency, Measures ofDispersion, Boxplot, Graphics, Scatter Plot, Sample Size, Confidence Estimates, Probability, Discrete and ContinuousDistributions, Hypothesis Testing, z-Test, Variance Analysis, t-Test, ANOVA, Regression, and Correlation Analysis.The study found that the online courses that utilized the tools of asynchronous communication, synchronouscommunication, and the virtual classrooms were more effective than the traditional teaching method in graduate-levelstatistics courses. The study determined that high student participation while engaged in asynchronous andsynchronous communication activities allowed a constant connection between the student and the professor, studentwith other students, and fostered higher student motivation. The results argue that teaching statistics and other coursesin mathematics related fields no longer have to be dominated by face-to-face instruction, as the findings support thatcourses in the discipline of mathematics are successfully taught using innovative education techniques leveraging onsynchronous communication technologies.