Interesting Reads This Week
Where learning happens, how learning happens and who controls it
Glenda Morgan
January 24, 2026
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Ah, the joys of technology. It took me a while to get here today, but what did I read this week?
In very different ways, much of what I read pointed to the same underlying question: where learning is happening, who controls it, and how much of it is slipping outside institutional boundaries.
Where learning happens
Wheelhouse, the Center for Community College Leadership and Research at UC Davis, has an interesting report on how the expansion of online course offerings has reshaped enrollment geography in California’s community college system over the past decade.
The headline finding could be seen as somewhat counterintuitive: online enrollment has surged, but course-taking remains strikingly local. Using system-wide administrative data from 2014–15 to 2023–24, the authors analyze first-time students across most California community colleges (excluding the fully online Calbright College), focusing on modality, distance from home campus, and cross-enrollment across institutions. I am especially interested in whether students are using online courses to study at a distance, so that is where I concentrate.
Since the pandemic, participation in online learning has increased dramatically, but most of that growth has come from students taking a single online course, what the report describes as multimodal enrollment.
Results show that since the onset of the pandemic, CCC enrollment shifted from mostly in-person-only instruction to a mix of multimodal and online-only instruction.
Despite the growth in online enrollments, course-taking behavior remains largely local. The report defines a non-local campus as one more than 30 miles away (about 48 kilometers for those of you in the rest of the world who enjoy the indignity of a rational measurement system). Using students’ ZIP codes and their “initial home colleges,” the institutions where they took the most credits in their first term, the authors track how far students actually range.
For students in the any-modality group (the red line), the pattern is strikingly stable: most continue to take courses locally, and that rate barely budges over time. Online only students taking of courses more than 30 miles away declined up until the pandemic but have been increasing sharply since then.
