What campus-based students think about the quality and benefits of e-learning

There is a trend in Irish universities to utilise the benefits of the e-learning as a mechanism to improve learning performance of campus-based students. Whilst traditional methods, such as face-to-face lectures, tutorials, and mentoring, remain dominant in the educational sector, universities are investing heavily in learning technologies, to facilitate improvements with respect to the quality of learning. The technology to support reuse and sharing of educational resources, or learning objects, is becoming more stable, with interoperability standards maturing. However, debate has raged about what constitutes effective use of learning technology. This research expands upon a study carried out in 2003 examining students’ perceptions of e-learning in a large undergraduate accounting class environment. As a result, improvements were made to the instructional design of the course, to enable students to engage interactively with content. The subsequent study, reported in this paper, adopted a broad range of techniques to understand students’ learning experience in depth. The findings of this research provide an insight into how these students really work and learn using technologies, if at all. It is hoped that our findings will improve the experience for both students and lecturers who engage in teaching and learning through this medium. 502 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 36 No 3 2005 © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2005. Introduction A recent trend in higher education is to create and provide online access to course materials. Over the past two decades academics and institutes of higher education have been diversifying their delivery of instruction through new Internet media such as learning management systems, asynchronous distance learning, and online classrooms amongst a myriad of other burgeoning educational technologies. This combination of traditional face-to-face lectures or tutorials, and web-based course content is better known as “blended learning,” purporting to blend the best aspects of real and virtual environments. Many Irish universities have invested in architectures and platforms to support their teaching staff in delivering material to students in a blended manner. Other institutions have adopted a lecturer-driven approach, whereby teaching staff are left to their own devices to supplement their lectures and tutorials with online material, hosted via their own web servers and typically open source, freeware software, or basic web pages. The reasons behind the drive to incorporate technology into the educational process are threefold. First, pressure to utilise information and communications technology (ICT) at university level comes from changes in the student demography. The rise of “full time part time students” is a phenomenon of recent years, where school leavers take part-time jobs whilst attending university, leaving less time for evening tutorials or weekend study. In addition, there is a drive for what is known as lifelong learning, whereby adults are increasingly returning to institutions of higher education to take supplementary courses whilst in full-time employment, or during short career breaks. In this regard, the Irish government has made a commitment to have 15% of adults in continuing higher education by 2006. The figure currently stands at less than 5% (Department of Education and Science, 2000). This movement to adult continuing education was also reflected in a statement made by Information Commission Society (Ireland): “The issue of integration IT to the teaching process is an important part of future improvements, which it will be crucial to pursue” (Boylan, 2000, p. 31). Second, changes in the market for delivery of education is also shifting. Private for-profit higher education institutions are offering a wide range of certificate and degree courses. The Irish Open University Initiative “Oscail” and its UK equivalent offer distance learning diploma and degree courses. Many of these courses are delivered through ICT, along with weekend face-to-face tutorials. This distance learning market has also seen the arrival of new entrants, such as the Atlantic University Alliance, a collaboration between National University of Ireland, Galway, University College Cork, and the University of Limerick. Similar undertakings are underway in other institutes of higher education, whereby expertise in delivering blended learning within the institution is being extended towards distance learning courses by using a significant amount of ICT to overcome geographic and time barriers. Third, another pressure on traditional institutions of higher education comes from innovations in new technologies. John Seely Brown and Paul Duiguid claim that these technologies “offer new ways to think of producing, distributing and consuming acaWhat students think about e-learning 503 © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2005. demic material. As with so many other institutions, new technologies have caused universities to rethink not simply isolated features but their entire mission and how they go about it” (Seely Brown & Duiguid, 2000). This sentiment is also being echoed by government policy towards higher education where the Irish State is attempting to set certain parameters of performance covering such areas as equity of access, commitment to e-learning and to ICT, commitment to life-long learning, and outreach to other communities. In the subject domain of accountancy, the integration of technology into the classroom is also becoming a central issue for accounting educators for an additional reason. Accountancy professionals in industry require competency in accountancy-related information technology (IT) skills. Higher education institutions, in response, have tried to simulate authentic learning scenarios in the accountancy class and incorporate IT topics into their programmes. However, the efficacy of introducing technology in accounting education remains unclear. Positive learning effects associated with IT in accounting education have been noted (Abdolmohammadi et al , 1998; Fetters, McKenzie & Callaghan, 1986; Friedman, 1981). Equally, evidence has shown that technology has negatively impacted on learning (Dickens & Harper, 1986; Togo & McNamee, 1997). Indeed, some critics harshly criticise its introduction to educational contexts. Selwyn (2002, p. 172) claims in generic terms that “...in the final analysis educational technology remains a diverting pastime and ‘add-on’ to the curriculum for some teaching and learners, whilst for most in education its impact has been slight.” This paper hopes to look at some of the issues raised by individual students with regard to the use of technology in the teaching and learning process. Rather than focusing on macro issues, such as the political decisions behind the integration of technology, this research aims to examine individuals’ acceptance or rejection of using ICT. Exploring the perspective of the individual student when discussing the use of technology is paramount to beginning to understand the nature of ICT in higher educational settings. This is of importance both to policy makers and education technologists in the debate on the role of ICT in education at an organisational level. The module and the medium This research focused on one module of The Principles of Accounting being taught to approximately 600 first-year undergraduate students at the University of Limerick. The module under investigation was part of a wider course, leading to a degree in Business Studies or Law and Accounting. The majority of students were between 17 and 19 years of age, coming from distributed second-level schools in Ireland. A minority were Erasmus students from various European countries, or mature students over the age of 23. For all, except overseas students, this was their first experience in using an e-learning platform, although most had previously informal used the web to gather information, or prepare coursework in second-level education, prior to entering university. This module was delivered by using a blended learning approach, supplementing weekly lectures, tutorials, and laboratory sessions with online course content, interac504 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 36 No 3 2005 © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2005. tive quizzes, and Excel tasks. A range of different e-learning assessments complemented the traditional weekly meetings. Students were asked to submit a compulsory paperbased accounting case study, and additionally were offered two optional ICT assignments, a stream of online multiple-choice quizzes, and an Excel project. A module web site provided course details, additional readings, and supplementary links. Employing multiple teaching methods simultaneously is a form of blended learning (Saunders & Werner, 2003). Alternative instructional resources can stimulate positive effects on accounting students’ learning experiences, according to (Rebele et al , 1998). Furthermore, instructional innovations are desirable to develop accounting students’ IT competencies (Albrecht & Sack, 2000). Figure 1 illustrates the staged delivery of both the traditional and online elements of the module. The university does not provide institutional support for e-learning on a campus-wide scale, but two other modules in their first year also used a blended learning delivery approach, providing lecture notes online, or sample answers, in the subject area of economics and mathematics. Both of these other modules differ in marking scheme and in the extent to which online supports are provided such as discussion boards, or positive marking schemes for continuous online assessments. As such, blended learning is not yet a norm across modules for first-year students at this current time. Methods The research developed on experience gained in a previous study on a prior