Within only a few years, the use of e-learning has increased rapidly in Austria. In certain subjects, up to 60% of university students report using e-learning platforms at least 'sometimes' or 'frequently' (Unger & Wroblewski, 2006). Yet, which aspects of e-learning do students consider important for their learning achievements and course satisfaction? This question was addressed by surveying 2196 students from 29 universities in Austria about their expectations of, and experiences in e-learning. Multiple regression analyses using Mplus 4.21 were carried out to investigate how different facets of students' expectations and experiences are related to perceived learning achievements and course satisfaction. With regard to their expectations, i.e., aspects of a course they consider important, students' achievement goals were the best predictors for success and ranked higher than other course characteristics. With regard to their experiences, students' assessments of the instructor's expertise in e-learning, and her/his counseling and support were the best predictors for learning achievement and course satisfaction. Furthermore, self-regulated and collaborative learning were related to learning achievements. The results of the study suggest to influence students' motivation and goals by adapting instruction accordingly and emphasize the importance of continuing education and training for the instructors.

Students' expectations of, and experiences in e-learning: Their relation to learning achievements and course satisfaction

Which aspects of e-learning courses do students experience as being favorable for learning? When do students prefer online or face-to-face learning components? These questions were the subject of a research study in a sample of 2196 students from 29 Austrian universities. The students completed a questionnaire on their experiences attending an e-learning course, on their perceived achievements, and on their preferences for online or face-to-face learning components. Students appreciated online learning for its potential in providing a clear and coherent structure of the learning material, in supporting self-regulated learning, and in distributing information. They preferred face-to-face learning for communication purposes in which a shared understanding has to be derived or in which interpersonal relations are to be established. An especially important result concerns students' perceptions of their learning achievements: When conceptual knowledge in the subject matter or skills in the application of one's knowledge are to be acquired, students prefer face-to-face learning. However, when skills in self-regulated learning are to be acquired, students advocate online learning.

Online or Face-to-Face? Students' Experiences and Preferences in E-Learning.

ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE: An Inquiry into Values, Robert M. Pirsig, HarperCollins Publishers, New York 1974, reprint 2005, 430 pages, $13.95. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) metaphorically outlines the intellectual journey that the War Machine as an institution needs to take in order to reform itself. The perfect place for this reform to begin is in the military's first operational war fighting school, the Army's School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS). Students at SAMS are reading ZMM in the true spirit of the school, the spirit of intellectual reform. Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege started SAMS in the early 1980s when he realized that the Army as an institution could not reform itself from the inside, from the topdown. SAMS students learn to think for themselves, freeing themselves from the doctrinal Procrustean bed of black-and-white thinking. ZMM can help us challenge our unconscious schemata of categorical thinking that force us into seeing the world in functional hierarchies made up of block-and-line charts and examine our unconscious conflation of what's in our minds with what's in the world--the reification of our mental models, theories, and myths. ZMM is a timeless classic accessible to anyone courageous enough to challenge his or her own convictions. The understanding gained is not about good old-fashioned heroic, warrior leadership; it is not about decision-making; it is not about problem-solving. It is about critical reasoning. ZMM will not leave the reflective person unaffected. Introduction by LTC Timothy Challans, U.S. Army Retired, Ph.D. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a bizarre title for a serious piece of literature, yet the title could not be more fitting. The philosophical quandaries in which the narrator engages proffer the reader an opportunity to expand upon traditionally held Western thoughts and values. The storyline is not typical of military readings, but unfortunately neither is the subject of critical thinking, which this book is all about. The title conjures images of Buddhist monks in secluded meditation, but also draws upon imagery of motorcycle maintenance to attract an audience with a proclivity for Western thinking into "an inquiry into values" and serious dialogue on logical reasoning and intuitive judgments about "quality." While taking a cursory, but grounding, tour through 2,500 years of philosophical evolution, the book challenges the reader to consider the value of self-reflection in order to increase the reader's capacity for critical thinking. It is a philosophically engaging modern epic well worth reading. It is not a manual for fixing motorcycles, nor will it have you sitting cross-legged in trancelike meditation, but it will make you scratch your head, challenge the way you think, and make you rethink the way you live. Robert Pirsig uses a father-son motorcycle trip across the northern region and west coast of the U.S. as the backdrop upon which he paints a candid picture of a well-educated, middle-aged man--presumably the author himself--struggling with his sanity. The narrator, previously subjected to electroshock therapy that left mental voids, is physically retracing his past and exploring the philosophical debates and discovery that he was previously obsessed with and which left him committed to an asylum. It is a captivating story filled with imagery to which the reader can easily relate, but the true power of the work is found in Pirsig's ability to use the story to pull the reader through a lesson on early Western philosophy while comparing it to aspects of Eastern philosophy. The narrator navigates through early Greek philosophical developments while drifting through periods of deep internal reflection, contemplating the meaning of artifacts that remain and memories that surface from his life before therapy. …

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

This research aims to explore and investigate potential factors influencing students’ academic achievements and satisfaction with using online learning platforms. This study was constructed based on Transactional Distance Theory (TDT) and Bloom’s Taxonomy Theory (BTT). This study was conducted on 243 students using online learning platforms in higher education. This research utilized a quantitative research method. The model of this research illustrates eleven factors on using online learning platforms to improve students’ academic achievements and satisfaction. The findings showed that the students’ background, experience, collaborations, interactions, and autonomy positively affected students’ satisfaction. Moreover, effects of the students’ application, remembering, understanding, analyzing, and satisfaction was positively aligned with students’ academic achievements. Consequently, the empirical findings present a strong support to the integrative association between TDT and BTT theories in relation to using online learning platforms to improve students’ academic achievements and satisfaction, which could help decision makers in universities and higher education and colleges to plan, evaluate, and implement online learning platforms in their institutions.

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Development of a new model on utilizing online learning platforms to improve students’ academic achievements and satisfaction

There are three main research goals in this study including (a) understanding the most important facilitators (support, strength) and complicators (barrier, concern, issues, problems) for online or distance education during COVID-19 from the unique perspective of college students, academicians, and teachers through Online Photovoice (OPV); (b) advocating with the volunteer participants and partners as allies to share the results with the key people and institutions through online avenues to enhance facilitators and address complicators; and finally, (c) investigating participants’ attribution of facilitators and complicators based on Ecological Systems Theory (EST) levels. The researchers utilized the adapted Turkish version of OPV to collect and used Online Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (OIPA) to analyze the data. Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) grounded in EST constructed the theoretical framework for the research. In total, 115 participants completed and consented for the study. Sixteen main facilitator-related themes emerged, and the five most expressed were having technology ( n = 31, 35%), internet ( n = 28, 32%), communication ( n =18, 20%), emotions ( n = 17, 19%), and economic resources ( n = 16, %18). Thirteen main complicators -related themes emerged, and the five most reported barriers were lacks of technological resources ( n = 41, 47%), internet ( n = 40, 46%), appropriate learning environments, learning opportunities ( n = 32, 36%) appropriate resources for online or distance education ( n = 18, 20%), and interaction ( n = 14, 16%). Participants attributed the facilitator and complicators to EST levels respectively as follows: individual/intrapsychic factors (84%; 69%), microsystem (45%; 59%), exosystem (36%; 43%), and macrosystem (34%; 44%). The researchers provided practical recommendations. The researchers obtained an institutional review board approval for this study.

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Understanding the Most Important Facilitators and Barriers for Online Education during COVID-19 through Online Photovoice Methodology

Higher education institutions undertake a range of approaches to evaluating and making judgments about the quality of their e-learning provision. This paper begins by exploring benchmarking as one current strategy in common use in universities to identify and implement quality practices: from the use of checklists (for example, of best practices and standards) to a more contemporary dynamic systems approach involving continuous cycles of feedback and improvement centred around the learners’ experiences of elearning. These practices are influenced by the teachers’ design of e-learning and emerging technologies as well as by the institutional and societal contexts in which both learners and teachers operate. We give an account of two major evaluation studies at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), utilising a systems approach to investigate the consequences of e-learning, and we inquire into the value of this particular institutional approach for deriving e-learning quality. We use selections from the large dataset to describe and analyse students’ and teaching staff’s experiences of an e-learning system (LMS) over a two-year period. Our findings reveal that learners’ experiences warrant consideration in shaping future e-learning developments at UTS, and that students value e-learning in facilitating their access to education for making choices about their learning and for enabling engagement in collaborative and interactive learning activities, while they also recognise the current constraints on e-learning imposed by the developers of LMS technologies.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/jeductechsoci.10.2.17

Using Students' Experiences to Derive Quality in an E-Learning System: An Institution's Perspective

Towards a mapping of the field of e-learning

The creation of UTS’s and Animal Logic’s Master of Animation and Visualisation (MAV) tackles fundamental and contemporary shifts in business and society by testing a model that could enable a matching paradigm shift in education As an industry–university initiative designed to educate the next generation of game-changers, the curriculum centres squarely on critical and creative thinking, problem posing and solving, innovation and invention, and complexity and collaboration Participants in the programme, academic researchers and industry partners work collectively to address complex creative problems in order to step beyond the boundaries of the known and into new domains In this chapter, we begin to describe and analyze this collaboration and its creative practices The three pillars of a framework for making sense of collective professional learning, developed and tested in a recent Australian Research Council Linkage Project, are used to examine the complex, dynamic, highly nuanced and ecological nature of learning as it occurred in this collaborative industry–university environment That process distilled a set of enacted principles As a test bed for explicating the art and science of collectivity in creative practice, initial findings suggest the nature of fine-grained studies now needed to yield further insights, model and theorize collective learning

Collective Learning in an Industry-Education-Research Test Bed

Academics have designed and developed role-play simulations to provide learning opportunities for students in different disciplines for many years now. The AUTC Information and Communication Technologies and Their Role in Flexible Learning project has collated exemplars of the designs on a website (in development). Drawing on this resource, this paper sets out to synthesise the previous developments as it begins the work of theorising learning designs. In this way further understandings might be generated whilst also guiding developments in fields of study beyond the individual designs that have been reported to date.

Generating professional knowledge based on e-learning research and development

There is increasing recognition of the need to rethink academic professional development, to shift it from industrial-era craft-based approaches to approaches more in tune with the complex, multi-faceted demands of contemporary higher education. We describe and analyse the learning of a group of three academics over a series of six audio taped conversations. Participants appeared to refine, by means of selection over time, the ways they categorised or carved up their world. Our findings suggest the potency of reconceiving professional development generatively, in terms of a biologically based selectionist theory of learning. We discuss the need for followup investigations of the extent to which these academics’ regenerated ideas inform their professional practice.

Tanja Golja

Papers

Using Students' Experiences to Derive Quality in an E-Learning System: An Institution's Perspective

Towards a mapping of the field of e-learning

Collective Learning in an Industry-Education-Research Test Bed

Generating professional knowledge based on e-learning research and development

Theorising professional development in the academy: a conversational approach