Tech-savvy students want real-life lecturers too, study finds
Universities have been warned not to assume that “digital native” students will embrace all e-learning initiatives, or indeed prefer them to traditional forms of education.
A report released by the Canadian consulting firm Higher Education Strategy Associates warns that calls for curricula to be “radically overhauled” are sometimes based on evidence that “can sometimes be alarmingly thin”.
The authors surveyed nearly 1,300 students to determine views on e-learning, saying that there had previously been “precious little research” done in this area.
The results, detailed in The State of E-Learning in Canadian Universities, 2011: If Students are Digital Natives, Why Don’t They Like E-Learning?, suggest that students still consider a mix of traditional and high-tech learning to be “second-choice”.
Although over a quarter of those surveyed said they believed the quality of learning materials was better in courses with electronic elements, around half said that the quality of education was better when courses were delivered entirely by a lecturer in person.
In addition, over two-thirds said that the quality of instructors was best on courses delivered in-person, with the report citing an “enormous desire [among students] to learn directly from a ‘sage on the stage’”.
Despite this, nearly 60 per cent of students spoken to said they wanted more course content to be offered electronically.
The authors of the report suggest that the seemingly contradictory messages have to do with convenience: “Students prefer physical texts,” they explain, “but they’d like to have the option of having an e-resource to read it wherever and whenever they need.”
The report concludes that the main problem with e-learning in Canadian institutions is with the quality of resources, with more investment needed in the integration between in-person and online learning.
The authors predict that, with the right investment, e-learning resources can become “a technology that actually enhances and is additive to their in-class experience".
An additional attraction of e-learning becomes apparent in another question asked as part of the survey: over half the students surveyed said that they were more likely to skip classes that offered online resources as it would be easier to catch up.
sarah.cunnane@tsleducation.com
Readers' comments (6)
16 Sep 2011 11:51am
It's not just students. Staff feel the pressure of the vast array of e-tools that are available, and sometimes feel overwhelmed with what they have to cope with (http://lawrie.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2011/08/16/overwhelmed/). The challenge is finding the right balance of tools against the content and course that they are suitable for. And allowing people to develop their skills in their relevant context.
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16 Sep 2011 12:28pm
It would help if you linked to the report (Kaznowska, E., Rogers, J., and Usher, A. (2011). The State of E-Learning in Canadian Universities, 2011: If Students Are Digital Natives, Why Don’t They Like E-Learning? Toronto: Higher Education Strategy Associates. http://higheredstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/InsightBrief42.pdf) rather then leaving it to readers to search for it. The use of the Digital Native term seems misleading - there appears to be an assumption that the students being surveyed had all grown up with ready access to the technologies. There is nothing in Prensky's idea that suggests people growing up today will magically acquire a skill-set and preferences for technology unless they are exposed to them throughout their development. Having said that, these results are very similar to those we obtained about 3 years ago. Essentially, there were approximately 8-10% of the respondents who were totally against e-Learning, and about 8-10% who were in favour of more e-Learning and less face to face. Two thirds think the quality of instructors is better in courses delivered face to face. That is hardly a surprise, as in many cases they probably do not associate the idea of an instructor being present in courses which are entirely online. The way the questions are worded here also lump together blended approaches with 'entirely online', which makes interpretation difficult. Slightly more respondents, for instance, regard blended or entirely-online courses as being better than, or as good as, face to face (50.7% against 49.4% - I presume there are rounding errors) Without a set of questions to determine whether students have the background to be considered Digital Natives, this survey says nothing about the merit of the theory. However, it does emphasise the findings we had that you can't please all of the people all of the time. Whichever axis you measure along, roughly 10% of people will be unhappy with what you are providing and another 10% tend to want you to do more of it, faster. Designing systems (either technological or pedagogical) which aim to cater for the middle ground will always tend to leave out a sizeable minority, which is why it is important to consider designing courses and VLEs or tools to support a students Personal Learning Environment which reach out to both extremes.
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16 Sep 2011 12:29pm
Didn’t the fella credited with coining that pesky outdated phrase a decade ago quickly retract his ideas in another book? Students aren’t ‘digital natives’: more worryingly, some institutions don’t have much of a clue what they’re doing either (leaving a significant gap for the private sector). @Lawrie Phipps: I appreciate that some staff may feel overwhelmed, but others do not. Provision and developments may be uneven but shouldn't be obstructed by digitally deterministic (or just uninformed) institutional powers-that-be. ‘E-learning’ is not a generic delivery vehicle for existing content i.e. dumping lecture notes in VLEs; this is what the report seems to assume. Do we really need ‘research’ to tell us that students are less likely to attend lectures if aware that audio-visual/texts will be made available online? Hopefully this isn't typical of the quality of ‘research’ in Canada. LLiDA from 2009 (JISC again, if a bit older at http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/llida/LLiDAReportJune2009.pdf) is a comprehensive account of cases from various UK/sectors, and makes good, if slightly terrifying, reading.
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16 Sep 2011 12:40pm
Erm… it sounds like a much-needed piece of work, but it's also utterly unsurprising to anyone who a) uses new media/tech in teaching and b) actually frequents classrooms rather than pontificates uncritically about e-learning from a distance. My expanded thoughts on this: http://plashingvole.blogspot.com/2011/09/ursine-defecation-news.html
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16 Sep 2011 12:53pm
'digital natives', hah! More like fish who don't know what water is: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/crazy-90-percent-of-people-dont-know-how-to-use-ctrl-f/243840/
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19 Sep 2011 4:01pm
Here is an example of what happens when academic experts get hold of technology. Give all of it a listen and report what you think. http://www.media.au.dk/podcast/?name=2008-07-22_eunis2008-mark_stiles.flv&p=episode
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