Professor conducts study to examine Distance Education

With ECU expanding more and more each year in Distance Education programs, a professor is in the process of conducting a study to examine the compatibility of students and this new modernized form of learning.

"The intent of the study is to determine whether factors related to self regulated learning and epistemological beliefs, beliefs about knowledge and learning, are associated with learner achievement in online courses," said Paul Bell, associate professor in the Department of Health Information Management and conductor of the study.

Bell said this idea was sparked when his program of health services and information management, went online about two years ago. He has since noticed some students were successful with the DE courses, while other students were not. The students who did not do as well with online learning actually ranged from adequate to good students based on their grades in the traditional face-to-face classroom environment.

Bell and his colleagues then outlined some of the major differences with the online courses and the face-to-face courses. They concluded there was a vast difference between the two and online learning may not best suit some students. Unlike the traditional classroom setting, online learning is a much more learner controlled environment and requires students to be solely responsible of their learning. Bell said some students are used to only the classroom based setting, having to learn on-line could potentially be a "recipe for disaster."

The traditional face-to-face learning environment provides regular contact with the instructor in which a student can lean on for support and receive reminders about tests coming up and receive verbal cues in a classroom, which communicate to the students what are the main aspects to concentrate on.

"It's harder to do that in cyberspace," Bell said.

"The whole issue of learner control and learner independence and taking the responsibility for one's learning, has been dubbed by the literature as self regulating learning."

The study consists of a questionnaire that has students to self rate and evaluate themselves.

Self-regulated learning and epistemological beliefs have different sub factors that may or may not be related to achievement. Another purpose of the study is to determine which sub factors are related to success in online learning.

Bell is going to take the results from the study and see if they correlate with the online courses they are taking this semester. Bell thinks that those who rate high in certain dimensions of self regulated learning and epistemological beliefs of knowledge and learning will have higher final grades.

If these two factors have an association with achievement in online learning then we should assess them before a student is placed in an online learning environment.

"It may be that online learning is not appropriate for their learning because they are not used to taking responsibility for their own learning," Bell said.

According to Bell, the study is meant to measure the students' "degree of self-regulation in learning and their beliefs about knowledge and learning." Previous research indicated that students with more sophisticated notions about learning had higher rates of success than other learners.

Self-regulated learning involved motivation, time and place study resource management and how confident a person is in their ability to learn.

Knowing how individual learner characteristics such as self-regulated learning and epistemological beliefs are related to success in learning online can help in the instructional design of online courses. For example, Internet based courses can include elements that help foster the development of individual self-regulated learning and that facilitate sophisticated beliefs about knowledge and learning.

This writer can be contacted at news@theeastcarolinian.com.