High‐tech versus high‐touch education: perceptions of risk in distance learning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose As colleges implement alternative forms of education delivery, prospective students must consider the method of instruction when choosing a post‐secondary institution. The purpose of this research paper is to assess the search criteria considered most important to prospective undergraduate students and to evaluate their preference for online versus on‐campus instruction. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews a selection of literature on college choice behavior, with special reference to on‐campus (high‐tech) versus online (high‐touch) delivery. A pilot study together with a conjoint methodology is used to measure the importance students place on method of instruction, relative to several traditional criteria. Findings The conjoint results identify two unique student segments (risk‐sensitive and cost‐sensitive) based on attitudes toward high‐tech versus high‐touch delivery. While the risk sensitive segment expresses strong preference for high‐touch delivery, the cost sensitive segment is open to high‐tech delivery, if the price is right. Practical implications Many studies have concluded that online education may be more suited for mature, graduate students. This study, however, identifies an undergraduate student segment with a propensity toward high‐tech education. As online technology continues to diffuse through society, prospective undergraduates are expected to become less averse to alternate means of instruction. Originality/value Although many studies have compared online versus on‐campus learning, few, if any, have examined the attitudes of prospective students applying to a post‐secondary program, having no experience with distance education. This study focuses on the needs of prospective undergraduate students, highlighting differences in attitude toward cost and risk.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it