David Parry
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
dave.parry@aut.ac.nz
 

Parry, D. (2004, June), What do online learners really do, and where and when do they do it?. Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology Vol. 2, Issue 2. ISSN 1176-4120. Retrieved from

ABSTRACT

Since 1999 The Business Faculty at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) has been using an online learning tool Business on-Line (BOL). The focus of this paper is the semester 1 (2002) period when the system was used by over 90 staff and 1,400 students. Asynchronous communication and file sharing are the major features of the system which is WWW-based and is accessible from inside and outside the institution. This paper describes some of the information available on the time and location of access to the system by students and staff. Some of these results show a large difference in access patterns by students and staff.

Keywords

On-line learning, asynchronous communication, collaborative computing.

1. BACKGROUND

Many educational institutions are using on-line learning systems to enhance the classroom experience. Business On line (BOL) has been in use at the business faculty of AUT since 2000 (Sallis, Carran & Bygrave, 2000). It is a WWW-based system, designed to support rather than replace the face-to-face process. BOL is primarily a communication tool following the philosophy of electronic collaborative groups (Fåhræus, Bridgeman, Rugelj, Chamberlain & Fuller, 1999). Features include synchronous and asynchronous text-based communication, file sharing, rostering and project management tools. Asynchronous communication occurs via a threaded discussion tool while file sharing is done via set of on-line folders.

Both the file system and the asynchronous discussion (known as the Forum) include logs of who uploaded and downloaded the objects and when this occurred. This information is displayed by the system, allowing users to identify who has read their message or downloaded their file. Messages posted in the forum cannot be edited or deleted by students after posting and anonymous posting is not allowed. Users are identified as students or staff and only have access to those parts of the system they have been enrolled in. The teaching philosophy underpinning the design of BOL follows many of the ideas described by Harasim, Hiltz, Teles and Turoff (1995) - discussion and file sharing occurs at the class level and within groups of students set up for cooperative project work and topic –based groups. A report of some of the uses of the system has been provided by Capner (2002) . At present around 1400 students and 90 staff members use the system. A majority of the student users are studying for the Bachelor of Business degree, spread across a number of different majors. Students from some Masters and Diploma courses also use the system.

1.1 Computing Resources

The Business faculty at AUT has over 4,100 full time equivalent students and around 650 places in computer labs. All staff members have access to their own computers. Many laboratory spaces are booked for classes, with around 50 available from 8am-9 pm every day for general student use. Technical support for AUT systems is available via a support help line within these times.

1.2 System Description

BOL is based around a series of Active server pages (ASP) which obtain their data from an SQL server 2000 Database (Microsoft). The host is a Windows 2000 Server (Microsoft) running Internet Information server version 5. All messages and files etc. are stored as entries in the database, with minimal processing occurring on the client side. This architecture was chosen to minimise the requirements of the local browser. A similar system is currently being offered commercially by the WEBSOL company ( WWW.Websol.co.nz ). BOL requires Netscape 4.74 or Internet Explorer 5.0 or later, but these are available on a CDROM that is freely available to students.

2. METHODS

All postings of messages in the forum, readings of these messages, file uploads and downloads were studied for the period Feb 2002- June 2002. Activity by administration personnel was not included in the analysis. IP addresses were coded to “within” AUT or “outside” AUT by using the first two elements of the address and the remainder discarded. None of the information derived from this study has been broken down by course enrolment or any other factor apart from the differentiation between staff and student. The analysis was performed using a Visual Basic programme (Microsoft) to extract relevant details and store them in a Microsoft Access Database, and Excel spreadsheet.

3. RESULTS

All statistical calculations were performed using Epiinfo Statcal for 2x2 Tables, and differences were classed as significant if p<0.01. Overall access rates were as shown in Table 1. “Within” refers to IP addresses within the AUT network.

Table 1 : Overall number of logins for Semester 1, 2002

There is a significant difference between the login locations of staff and students. The daily login patterns for staff and students are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Login patterns

There are significant differences in the ratios of inside and outside postings for both students and staff. There are significant differences between staff and students for both reading and posting messages. Totals follow the student ratios, because of the number of students vs. staff.

Table 2. Forum messages - overall message posting locations

 Table 3. Forum messages - overall message reading locations

There is a significant difference in the within/outside split for student file reading and uploading but no significant difference between the ratios for staff. There are significant differences between staff and students for both uploading and downloading files.

 Table 4.  Files - overall file upload locations

Table 5. Files - overall file download locations

4. DISCUSSION

Firstly, messages and files are read on average quite a large number of times. Each file is read on average more than 49 times. Each message is read more than 9.5 times. Each logon leads to around one file reading and two message readings. Each user logs on roughly twice a week over the 15-week period.

Students are always more likely to perform any action outside the university. For files, students are more likely to read them outside the university and post them within the university – this would appear to support the contention that bandwidth or software limitations would tend to reduce file uploads from outside the institution. However the difference is small in percentage terms. The difference is reversed in terms of forum postings where students are more likely to post from outside than they are to read from outside. Staff members are, in contrast, more likely to read postings from outside the university than any other activity measured.

5. CONCLUSIONS

This work has shown that the pattern of use of the system is significantly different between staff and students with students being much more likely (59.55% versus 11.94%) to use the system from outside the institution. Large numbers of logins also occur outside the times when technical support is available.

In terms of the design of the system, these results seem to indicate that support for outside use is important for students, and less so for staff. Inevitably in the development process, the staff experience may tend to be given more weight than the students – for example staff members are more likely to be long-term users of a system and may have more authority to influence the system development. This may lead to inappropriate design for students who have relatively limited access to campus-based machines.

There has been little work done on the usage patterns of WWW based collaborative tools however the BSCW system has recently been analysed in this way (Appelt, 2001). With the BOL system this and other data (including message length, time between postings etc.) are provided to teachers of individual modules, and this has been found to be helpful. It would be interesting to compare the patterns in different settings and for different types of course and system. Synchronous communication could also be studied in this way and some interesting work on the effects of introduction of Instant Messages in a workplace has been performed (Herbsleb, Atkins, Boyer, Handel & Finholt, 2002).

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The majority of development of BOL was performed by Adrian Sallis and Grant Carran and myself. The project was lead by Jenny Bygrave. Much of the design of the system was improved by comments by users of the system especially Jonathan Metheny, Philippa Gerbic, Krassie Petrova and Helene Capner.

7. REFERENCES

Appelt, W. (2001). What Groupware Functionality Do Users Really Use? Analysis of the Usage of the Bscw System. Parallel and Distributed Processing, 2001. Proceedings. Ninth Euromicro Workshop on, Inst. for Appl. Inf. Technol., Nat. Res. Center for Inf. Technol., St. Augustin, Germany, Practical.

Capner, H. (2002). Managing the 'E" in Elearning. Distance Education Society Of New Zealand, Wellington, New Zealand.

Fåhræus, E. R., Bridgeman, N., Rugelj, J., Chamberlain, B. & Fuller, U. (1999). Teaching with Electronic Collaborative Learning Groups. Annual Joint Conference Integrating Technology into Computer Science Education - Working group reports from ITiCSE on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Cracow, Poland, ACM.

Harasim, L., Hiltz, S. Teles, L., & Turoff, M. (1995). Learning Networks : A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning Online, MIT.

Herbsleb, J. D., Atkins, D. L., Boyer, D. G., Handel, M., & Finholt, T. A. (2002). Introducing Instant Messaging and Chat in the Workplace. Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, ACM.

Sallis, A., Carran, G., & Bygrave, J. (2000). The Development of a Collaborative Learning Environment: Supporting the Traditional Classroom. WWW9, Netherlands.

Copyright © 2004 David Parry
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