The Efficacy of Online Higher Education in Latin America: A Systematic Literature Review

The objective of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to summarize the Spanish and English language literature that compares the academic performance of Latin American university students in online and face-to-face courses. Research questions focus on trends, mean differences, and the significance of the findings. It includes peer-reviewed articles published between 2005-2020, found in EBSCO/SciELO/HAPI/WOS/Scopus databases, that offer an experimental or quasi-experimental research design to analyze efficacy; articles with case studies outside Spanish-speaking Latin America, focusing on K-12/post-graduate education, and/or solely including satisfaction/qualitative measures were excluded. The final 35 articles analyze courses mostly based on a hybrid pedagogy used for a treatment section. After removal of value-added observations, results on 30 outcomes were synthesized in descriptive tables, forest and funnel plots. In most cases, online components do no harm to students of a given course; outcomes increase significantly in 57% of the cases, using a sample of over 10,000 student observations. Intermediate effect sizes from the online innovations are over 0.60 (intervals [-0.13-1.470]) and largest when student achievement is the outcome. Publication limitations include limited student background information, unclear sorting across sections, and small sample sizes which suggest caution in the interpretation of results.