One area we have looked into as part of the DIVERSE project, is the attitudes students have towards online learning. As such, we have recently carried out a survey amongst university students to learn more about their attitudes and perceptions towards online learning.

The results of this survey were in general positive, and demonstrate that students clearly value online learning as part of their studies. This is illustrated in the word cloud below that summarises student’s opinions on online learning tools.

A word cloud representing opinions of online learning tools

From this word cloud it is clear that students view online learning tools as an advantage to their studies. This is further reinforced when students were asked to rate their experiences with online learning tools. In this case, the mean rating for online learning tools was 7/10.

This survey also examined student usage of online learning tools and found that 93.11% of students surveyed reported using an online learning tool at least 2-3 times a week. However, this pales in comparison to social networking usage amongst students, as 86.21% of participants reported using a social networking site on a daily basis.

The overall conclusion from this survey suggests that online learning tools are perceived well by students.

One of the recent changes here at DIVERSE was the decision to offer the resource clouds out to wider spectrum of lecturers and students within the University of Lincoln. We wanted people to benefit from DIVERSE and with the exam period creeping up we’re giving all lecturers within the School of Computer Science the option to adopt DIVERSE to help aid their revision plans for students. Since the announcement we’ve noted a noticeable increase in the amount of lecturers logging in to DIVERSE; we’re hoping after seeing what we’ve created they’ll opt to take it to the next level and start using it within their lectures!

Keep posted to find out more