Learning environment of a distance and partly-distance postgraduate coursework programs
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Learning environment of a distance and partly‑distance postgraduate coursework programs Keith F. Joiner1 · Leanne Rees1 · Britt Levett1 · Elena Sitnikova1 · Dijana Townsend1 Received: 18 April 2019 / Accepted: 3 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract To provide ongoing learning for busy professionals, universities are increasingly offering postgraduate opportunities by distance and online. This research examined the learning environments of five such subjects. A total of 377 students took part in a wider study into the efficacy of students formally critiquing each other’s work. This article reports students’ preferences for their learning environment, whether the pedagogy met their preferences, differences in preferences by age, gender, previous academic achievement level, distance learning experience, and prior experience in peer critiquing. Research methods involved using direct survey questions on learning preferences, the College and Classroom University Environment Inventory (CUCEI) and qualitative interviews. CUCEI versions were used to measure students’ preferred and then actual perceived learning environment, thereby enabling assessment of environmental fit. We found significant differences in the environment across most demographics. For example, older students preferred more Involvement and Student Cohesiveness and perceived more actual Involvement, Satisfaction and Task Orientation than younger students. Also, students of lower or average prior academic achievement showed significantly better environmental fit compared with students of higher prior achievement. The CUCEI remains a suitable instrument for characterising university pedagogical and demographic differences, even for subjects taught by distance. Encouraged by the incisiveness of the standardised environmental instruments, future work is proposed to benchmark the overall university’s postgraduate distance program using an environment inventory specific to tertiary distance learning and another to online constructivist pedagogy. Keywords College and University Classroom Environment Inventory (CUCEI) · Demographic differences · Distance learning · Learning environments · Online forums structured peer critiquing · Tertiary education
* Keith F. Joiner [email protected] 1
School of Engineering and IT, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, Northcott Drive, Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
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Learning Environments Research
Introduction Universities are increasingly providing distance learning via online platforms with high hopes that online learning might create better learning environments through factors such as flexibility, self-paced learning, privacy, educational innovation, interactive feedback and tutorial functions (Schornack and Beck 2016). However, there are also significant concerns about student engagement with the distance learning environments (Walker and Fraser 2005), the quality of such ‘virtual’ education (Mahdiuon et al. 2017) and the effect of commercial pre
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