One area we have looked into as part of the DIVERSE project, is the attitudes students have towards online learning. As such, we have recently carried out a survey amongst university students to learn more about their attitudes and perceptions towards online learning.

The results of this survey were in general positive, and demonstrate that students clearly value online learning as part of their studies. This is illustrated in the word cloud below that summarises student’s opinions on online learning tools.

A word cloud representing opinions of online learning tools

From this word cloud it is clear that students view online learning tools as an advantage to their studies. This is further reinforced when students were asked to rate their experiences with online learning tools. In this case, the mean rating for online learning tools was 7/10.

This survey also examined student usage of online learning tools and found that 93.11% of students surveyed reported using an online learning tool at least 2-3 times a week. However, this pales in comparison to social networking usage amongst students, as 86.21% of participants reported using a social networking site on a daily basis.

The overall conclusion from this survey suggests that online learning tools are perceived well by students.

One of the recent changes here at DIVERSE was the decision to offer the resource clouds out to wider spectrum of lecturers and students within the University of Lincoln. We wanted people to benefit from DIVERSE and with the exam period creeping up we’re giving all lecturers within the School of Computer Science the option to adopt DIVERSE to help aid their revision plans for students. Since the announcement we’ve noted a noticeable increase in the amount of lecturers logging in to DIVERSE; we’re hoping after seeing what we’ve created they’ll opt to take it to the next level and start using it within their lectures!

Keep posted to find out more

As part of the roll out of DIVERSE, myself and Max liaise with departments which have volunteered to use DIVERSE (HLSS and B&L). This role includes giving support and helping establish DIVERSE in modules through the use of workshops and talks etc. Today myself and Max gave a talk to a group of students studying a module in HLSS.

This talk gave us an opportunity to introduce the DIVERSE project to students and also allowed us to provide a demonstration on how to use the tool. Hopefully this talk has raised awareness amongst students, and will further help student engagment with the DIVERSE tool.

Until next time.

Apologies for the delay in updates over the last month, we have been very busy sorting out  the roll out of DIVERSE. The good news however, is that DIVERSE is now being used by Business & Law and HLSS, alongside it’s current usage within the School of Computer Science.

As part of this we are also conducting a survey about attitudes towards online learning. This survey can be found here.

From a technical standpoint, we have incorporated most of the features suggested by users. Based on feedback we received from our second workshop these changes seem to be well received. In terms of stability so far DIVERSE seems to be doing quite well; the real test however will be in the next few weeks when DIVERSE is being used regularly.

Part of the technical upgrades we have carried out also includes the addition of a statistics hub for DIVERSE. This hub is a serious of pages which produces data from how users are using DIVERSE; this data can then be used as part of our research.

In addition, this collection of statistics also allows us to work on future upgrades to DIVERSE, one such example is using these statistics to become part of an incentive program (e.g. user badges etc.) . These ideas will be covered in the future.

Until next time.