SYNCHRONOUS AND ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION: A DETERMINING FACTOR IN THE GAP BETWEEN THE TEACHING ONLINE AND TRADITIONAL STATISTICS.

The purpose of this study was to compare the academic performance of online courses in statistics with traditional courses in statistic for MBA students at a private university in Puerto Rico. The research utilized an experimental study design for two groups, where a t test statistical analysis was used, with a 99% level of confidence. The population of the study was composed of 47 students, of which 20 were from the control group and 27 were from the experimental group. Students in the experimental group were exposed to the online courses through the platform Blackboard Collaborate, 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-face classroom method. The content for both groups were: Data Types, Measures of Central Tendency, Measures of Dispersion, Boxplot, Graphics, Scatter Plot, Sample Size, Confidence Estimates, Probability, Discrete and Continuous Distributions, 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, synchronous communication, and the virtual classrooms were more effective than the traditional teaching method in graduate-level statistics courses. The study determined that high student participation while engaged in asynchronous and synchronous communication activities allowed a constant connection between the student and the professor, student with other students, and fostered higher student motivation. The results argue that teaching statistics and other courses in mathematics related fields no longer have to be dominated by face-to-face instruction, as the findings support that courses in the discipline of mathematics are successfully taught using innovative education techniques leveraging on synchronous communication technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]