According to the Global Education Digest 2009 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics [UIS], 2009), the number of students pursuing tertiary education globally has skyrocketed over the past 37 years, from 28.6 million in 1970 to 159.5 million in 2008. Today, there is widespread concern in the Caribbean region about the issue of gender and achievement in education in general, and higher education in particular. This paper explores this phenomenon regionally and globally, providing a critical analysis of explanations and theorizing that have emerged to understand this situation in both contexts.

The article sought to compare the performance of online and traditional face-to-face students who were identically assessed in two graduate courses offered concurrently in the two modes. It hypothesised that there was no significant difference between the achievement levels of online and face-to-face students across years in two separate graduate courses. The study utilised an ex post facto design and used archival data on the final assessment scores of students. The findings suggest that the face-to-face students tended to perform at a higher level than the online students.