Sounds like an interesting project. My first thought is that one issue I'd expect you to run into is that your two groups are going to look very different. For instance, (I'm guessing) perhaps the students in your online course will be older. Having basic demographic information (as you alluded to) will be helpful in this regard. In addition to demographics such as age and gender, you might consider asking whether english is the first language of your participants. This may or may not be an issue at your institution.
Beyond that, I'd also suggest asking your students questions such as why they are taking the course--major requirment, minor requirement, personal interest, etc. These responses (multiple choice or open ended) you could then place into a small number of categories and use as a variable in your subsequent analysis. I suggest this because I think the reason a person takes a course might affect their motivation to learn. Along similar lines, at the end of the course I'd ask your participants questions such as how many hours per week they spent studying for the course, and several likert-scale items such as how difficult/interesting/engagint they found the course. Good Luck. Melanie Rogers City University of New York . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
