The learning experiences of first time e-learners

• Main Author: Fortuin, Bernel
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: Internet in higher education; Higher education computer-assisted instruction; College teaching computer network resources; College students; Learning
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10210/4509

M.Ed. === Information and communication technologies are effecting widespread changes in all spheres of life including the educational context of South African higher education. While a great deal of emphasis is placed on the issue of bandwidth, and rightly so, the broader context in which the mediation of learning with computers takes place is still to a large degree neglected. It is within this context that the learning experiences of first time e-learners who had participated in the online semester course Education 2A at the R.A.U. University were examined. These students initially appeared to experience great difficulty adapting to the mode of participation in e-learning activity, suggesting that there was a mismatch between the values and priorities of learning as mediated by the web medium and the epistemology of learners situated in cultural practice. The initial problem of struggling to adapt to e-learning, was contextualised as a reciprocal process of interactivity in which the e-learner establishes a relationship with the cultural practice as the result of epistemological, methodological and ontological change. Sociocultural and activity theory provided the main theoretical foundation of this inquiry. In this theory there is a distinction between operations, actions and the overall activity that governs these and that situate the actions. The inquiry was therefore motivated by the need to understand and give substance to the learning experiences of first time e-learners within a systemic view of human computer interaction, as opposed to a cognitive approach to systems design (Kapetelinin in Nardi, 1996:46). Consequently, the inquiry examined the dynamic, reciprocal relationship of interactivity as mediated by the web medium, and epistemological, methodological and ontological transformation of the elearner, as she interacts in this ecosocial system. Motivated by the nature of the research problem and the socioconstructivist theoretical framework which framed my thinking around this problem, the inquiry was designed as a component of a larger action inquiry (Henning, Fortuin, Grobler & Brown, in progress), based on the principle of "communicative rationality" as proposed by Habermas (Ewert, 199 I :34) and conducted as qualitative and interpretive research. It was aimed not so much at monitoring and evaluating the course, but more at capturing and assessing the nature of student learning, specifically the processes of student communication and reflection in their lived experience in the course.