Small institutions -- evaluation of distance education courses

Per Gathen
Arvika Näringslivscentrum
Sweden

Our institution is exploring how and to what extent we can replace our existing face-to-face courses with distance learning courses and/or add distance-delivered elements to our present mainly face-to-face courses. Due to location and/or obligations, some of our potential students find it difficult to attend normal on-campus courses.

We have two distance education courses in history and two similar courses in religion meant for adults who intend to acquire qualifications for university studies. All four courses are taught to small groups of students (between five and ten students in each group) who live relatively short distances from our school.

The main objectives of the present case study are partly to ensure that our present and future Web-based distance education courses meet identified learner needs; partly to identify students' difficulties in learning effectively and thereby make our distance education a more satisfying learning experience. Our more specific aims are to collect and assess data that will

• give us a chance to acquire knowledge about our present and potential distance education students. What do they prefer -- face-to-face instruction or the flexibility that distance education can provide. Why?
• help to improve our existing distance education design, both the basic design elements and the interactive factors and create the best mix of face-to-face and distance education
• be useful for the staff members who are developing new distance education courses. We want to identify factors to consider when designing and developing new courses for distance learning
• provide useful background elements in future on-campus courses for our distance educators. We intend to improve future distance education tutoring

The present study will also hopefully show how a fairly small institution with limited resources can improve the quality of their distance education courses by using mainly qualitative techniques

The following methods are used:

• short questionnaires are handed out to collect basic information about each student
• the students are asked to keep a diary for a short period of time
• we have extended semi-structured interviews with the students, which are tape recorded and analysed