Also troubling is that during this period some reliable sources of information became less suitable for educational purposes for example, the Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) grew exponentially: the reports for Working Group I about the Physical Science expanded from 414 pages in 1990 to 3949 pages in 2021, for Working Group II about Impact and Adaptation from 296 pages in 1990 to 3675 pages in 2021, and for Working Group III about Mitigation from 438 pages in 1995 to 2913 pages in 2022 (Fig. Only four years later after a new administration took office was this censoring reversed. To forestall action on climate change, the government of the United States in 2017 removed hundreds of webpages about climate change from the websites of federal agencies and departments and scrubbed the term “climate change” from thousands of others. Support for policies that address climate change depends on an educated populace and its comprehension of difficult scientific concepts. After correcting for performance-gaps among different demographic groups, the COVID-19 pandemic had no significant effect on online student performance and students in the online version scored 2% lower (on a scale of 0–100) than those in the face-to-face version, a penalty that may be a reasonable tradeoff for the ease of scheduling and accessibility that these students desire. Women, seniors, English language learners, and humanities majors disproportionately chose to enroll in the online version because of its ease of scheduling and accessibility.

Both versions were taught by a single instructor, thus, minimizing instructor bias. The objective here was to compare the performance of 1790 undergraduates taking either an online or face-to-face version of an introductory course on climate change. Yet the role that online instruction should assume in post-secondary science education remains contentious despite its near ubiquity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public understanding about complex issues such as climate change relies heavily on online resources.

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