Effectiveness and Problems of Distance Learning

Abstract

In this paper, attendance in distance learning courses of a cyber university has been surveyed in an effort to verify the effectiveness of distance learning. Based on survey data from 4,749 distance learning participants, major attending place, major reasons for attending online class, fidelity to online classes, attending time per week, perceived educational effectiveness, perceived and relative seriousness of problems, and other variables have been evaluated. The results indicate that perceptional seriousness of the investigated problems is not statistically important. The findings indicate that, among operational problems, self willingness and cheating are the most remarkable. In contrast, the relative seriousness of traditionally recognized problems such as H/W availability and network speed among environmental problems is least remarkable. An analysis of demographic differences such as sex, employment, and school year in terms of seriousness of problems is also performed. The results reveal the existence of statistically significant differences according to sex, employment, and school year with regard to almost all elements of environment, actual current conditions, and seriousness of problems, with the exception of some elements such as attending place and perceived fidelity.