An Online Course Of Business Statistics: The Proportion Of Successful Students

Abstract

This article describes the students' academic progress in an online course of business statistics through interactive software assignments and diverse educational homework, which helps these students to build their own e-learning through basic competences; i.e. interpreting results and solving problems. Cross-tables were built for the categorical variables: course-type (at 2 levels of classification: “online” and “classroom”) and the 2 levels of gender, where the dependent variable was the proportion of successful and unsuccessful students. The statistical analysis was performed via the Chi-square test for which we found that the variable “course-type” was not significant (p-value=0.512).  Similarly, the variable “gender” was not significant (p-value=0.652).  Both conclusions were also confirmed via the Normal distribution z-test with similar p-values: 0.516 for course-type and 0.556 for gender. Thus, our research indicates that the population proportion of successful students in a course of Business Statistics does not depend on their gender; likewise, the proportion of success is not affected nor depends on the manner on how these students decided to take their course instruction, whether online or in a classroom.