The Internet in face-to-face higher education: Can interactive learning improve academic achievement?

Recent research on e-learning shows that blended learning is more effective than faceto-face learning. However, a clear empirical response has not been given to the cause of such improvement. Using a data set of 9044 students at two Catalan universities and a quasi-experimental approach, two possible hypotheses identified in previous research are studied. The results show that the principal cause of the improvement is not, in itself, the increase in time spent online for educational purposes. Rather, increasing the time devoted to studying online is only useful when it takes place as some form of interactive learning. The educational implications of these results are discussed. Introduction Internet use in higher education has grown exponentially in recent years (Allen & Seaman, 2010; OECD, 2010; Smith Jaggars & Bailey, 2010). However, with regard to improving students’ achievement, there is no agreement in the literature on what the benefits of Internet use are. Empirical research on the effectiveness of e-learning has focused mainly on comparing the results of fully computer-mediated teaching with those of face-to-face teaching (comparison of means). In such research, the results are often inconclusive and occasionally contradictory. Indeed, more recent meta-analyses generally tend to show that there are no significant differences in the level of learning that students achieve (Bernard et al, 2004; Means, Toyama, Murphy, Bakia & Jones, 2009). No significant differences between the effectiveness of online and face-to-face learning have been detected in recent research either. However, the incorporation of the Internet into face-to-face education has indeed been shown to have beneficial effects on academic achievement (Means et al, 2009; Tamim, Bernard, Borokhovski, Abrami & Schmid, 2011). The incorporation of technology into education is not a homogenous intervention (Ross, Morrison & Lowther, 2010). Today, the Internet can be used to accomplish various types of learning (Means et al, 2009): British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 45 No 1 2014 149–159 doi:10.1111/bjet.12007 © 2013 British Educational Research Association 1. Expository, where content is transmitted unidirectionally via the technology. 2. Active, where students use the technology individually to explore information and solve problems. 3. Interactive, where the technology mediates human interaction and knowledge emerges from such interaction. In addition, the different learning modalities are often linked to different learning conditions. In this respect, Means et al (2009) point out that Internet use in education cannot be compared with face-to-face education because Internet use was usually associated with different curricula, although nowadays the curricula are often the same. Furthermore, Internet use may lead to longer study times and greater interaction. Therefore, the higher academic achievement of students on blended learning courses compared to those on fully face-to-face courses (for a detailed review of research on this issue, see Tamim et al, 2011) cannot be explained as something intrinsic to the incorporation of the Internet into education, but rather as a consequence of the different instructional conditions that may be associated with the technology. However, while the conclusions of such studies (Means et al, 2009; Ross et al, 2010) highlight the need for further research to elucidate what the conditions are that make blended learning improve achievement, the data analysed in the studies reviewed do not allow this question to be answered. Aim In this research paper, we shall go a stage further and answer the following questions in the context of higher education: • With an equivalent curriculum, is increasing the time spent studying online always effective in terms of improving academic achievement? Practitioner Notes What is already known about this topic • The incorporation of technology into education is not a homogenous intervention. • Blended learning is often more effective than face-to-face learning. What this paper adds • This paper explores what causes blended learning to be more effective than face-to-face learning. • The principal cause of the improvement is not, in itself, the increase in the time spent studying that using the Internet for educational purposes may entail. • Increasing the time spent studying online is only useful when it takes place as some form of interactive learning. Implications for practice and/or policy • To maximise the time spent studying online, it is beneficial to interact with other actors in the learning process. • Incorporating the Internet as an interactive learning catalyst is an effective strategy to get the maximum benefit from the investment made in that technology. • Online interaction is especially relevant to the study of academic achievement inequality that the incorporation of the Internet can introduce into higher education systems. 150 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 45 No 1 2014 © 2013 British Educational Research Association • With an equivalent curriculum, does the greater capacity of online instruction to incorporate interaction have a beneficial effect on improving academic achievement? For our analytical objectives, we divided the three types of learning that can be accomplished online into two: interactive learning and individual learning, the latter of which encompasses the categories of expository learning and active learning. On the basis of this division, we shall compare the effects of making an intensive use of the Internet to accomplish interactive learning with the effects of making an intensive use of the Internet for other, more individual types of learning activities. Taking account of the fact that the indicators measuring both treatments are comparable with respect to the weekly number of hours that students spend on each one, if it is shown that Internet use for interactive learning is more effective than Internet use for individual learning, then it will be possible to support the hypothesis that the principal element that makes the incorporation of e-learning effective is its capacity to increase the potential for interaction in the learning process. Data and methods Data We used an online questionnaire to obtain the necessary data for the research. In 2006, the questionnaire was sent out to all students attending two Catalan universities of different types. A generalist university (University of Barcelona) and a technical university (Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya. BarcelonaTech). These data were complemented with information from the Government of Catalonia’s administrative registers of academic achievement. The differences between the two universities studied allowed us to access a variety of students that made the results less dependent on the type of degree courses offered and on the curricula and teaching–learning strategies of each university. The information gathering method (online questionnaire sent via institutional email services) allowed those students that had dropped out of their studies (the number of students with zero credits passed was 3.37% from the sample and 7.6% from all students of the three selected universities) and that were not Internet users to be excluded, since a lack of response to the questionnaire served as a filter to eliminate those students for whom the effect of the Internet on achievement would be zero, either because they did not use the Internet or because their achievement was equal to zero. In total, information was available on 8046 students. The characteristics of the students were similar to the characteristics of all students of the three universities studied as a whole, other than the variables for academic achievement and Internet usage (time). Given the high number of individuals in the study, the results obtained have greater external validity than those obtained in the majority of experimental studies on the effect of Internet use in education. Treatment measurement and output In order to meet the proposed objectives, we divided the types of learning that can be accomplished online into two: interactive learning and individual learning, the latter of which encompasses the categories of expository learning and active learning. The items used to measure the degree of Internet use for learning are dichotomous variables, which include the students’ answers to a set of questions on whether they had used the Internet for different academic purposes. Five of such uses were defined as individual learning (searching for information, looking up teaching plans and bibliographical references, looking up course materials, work with bookmarks and subscription to mailing lists on the study area) and four as interactive learning (communicating with lecturers, communicating with fellow students, online The Internet in face-to-face higher education 151 © 2013 British Educational Research Association discussions on the study area and cooperative work). Table 1 shows the percentage of students who claim to use the Internet for each of the proposed purposes. In order to elaborate indices of use for each type of learning (individual and interactive), the number of uses from those described previously was totalled. The result of this operation is an ordinal variable reflecting the number of different uses that each student makes of the Internet in each of the proposed types of learning (individual and interactive). So the maximum is five uses for individual learning and four uses for interactive learning. In the analyses performed, students with intensive Internet use for individual learning were considered to be those making four or five of the uses defined as such (36.73% higher), and students with intensive Internet use for interaction to be those making three or four of the uses in that category (39.01% higher). In order to measure academic achievement in the 2005–2006 academic year, the offici