Study: Stay at home orders caused an increase in learning at home
Siobhan Treacy | March 23, 2021A study from Cornell University and Arizona State University found that online learning grew in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The staggered adoption of nonessential business closures (NBCs) in the U.S. was used to estimate the effects of the pandemic on demand for online learning. Time constraints were noted as one of the biggest barriers for learning at home, but the stay-at-home orders and NBCs gave people time they did not have before.
During the study, the team gathered data from DataCamp, an online platform tailored toward programming skills. DataCamp offers almost 400 self-paced interactive courses on Python for data science, applied finance and more. 
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Researchers studied anonymous user records from January 2018 to September 2020 and aggregated information by ZIP code, population density, median household income, race, age distribution and other demographics. They also gathered daily county data on coronavirus cases, deaths from the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center and weekly county data in relation to an area’s compliance with social distancing policies from Unacast, a location-data firm.
The team sampled new and existing users in the U.S. from more than 22,000 combined ZIP codes. There were 277,000 new users and 70,000 existing users. The team saw significant increases in engagement as the pandemic continued. The introduction of NBC saw a nine percent increase before the control variables were factored in and it rose to 14% after ZIP code-specific characteristics were factored in. These results suggest that areas hit harder bythe pandemic saw strong adoption from new users and were more likely to see increased weekly engagement among existing users. The DataCamp data showed that NBC rollout led to a 38% increase in new users and a 6% increase in engagement among existing users on the platform.
The results support the idea that online platforms can provide accessible and inclusive environments for learning new skills. In the future, the team wants to explore the effect that this increase in online learning has on the labor market.
The study was published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
One might not have needed a <...Study...> to show that.
In reply to #1
Along with all the Captain Obvious sneers, a more interesting study would be AFTER the pandemic will more in-home learning take place because quite frankly, some parents may realize some real benefits to doing so?
For instance, about 14 years ago, due to behavioral problems with one my daughters, my wife pulled her out of high school for an entire year. She was home schooled using a state accredited remote learning curriculum. It was probably the best thing we did to break the toxic ties to 'friends' who were not her friend.
At any rate, she was able to master the course objectives including homework and exams in about three hours a day. School took six to seven hours a day. My daughter actually enjoyed the home schooling because of the freedom it gave both her and my wife. This exercise actually did a lot to restore the mother-daughter bonds.
My daughter did go back to the high school for her junior and senior years and was successful. She joined the Army and eventually went back to school and earned her R.N. as well.
With remote learning, a family could be sailing around the world, or exploring the continents in an RV while the children continue their schooling and learning. Having options are good.