Online Course Safe and Sustainable Sanitation: Factors Affecting Students' Satisfaction in an e-Learning Environment
Särkilahti, Maarit (2011)
2011
Ympäristö- ja energiatekniikan koulutusohjelma
Luonnontieteiden ja ympäristötekniikan tiedekunta - Faculty of Science and Environmental Engineering
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2011-06-08
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-2011062214743
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tty-2011062214743
Tiivistelmä
Since the beginning of the 2000's the Environmental Engineering and Biotechnology Laboratory, Tampere University of Technology, has offered online courses. During the academic year 2010-11 four online courses were organized and one of them was Safe and Sustainable Sanitation. The course is based on scientific work presented at the International Dry Toilet Conference. The goals of the conference based online course include a distribution of the latest sanitation knowledge to a wide audience and a maximum exploitation of the scientific work presented in the conference. The course is aimed at advanced M.Sc. students, Ph.D. students and postdoctoral students from Finnish and international universities as well as sanitation professionals. All together 218 students from 37 different countries have participated in the course.
The course has been offered for five times (2006-10) and after each course realization, student feedback has been collected with an online questionnaire. In the empirical part of the thesis, student feedback was analyzed using both, qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition to the basic statistical analysis, data was classified in order to indicate factors affecting student satisfaction. The aim of the study was to describe the exceptional character of the online course and point out the development needs. Another concern was the online course cooperation with other higher education institutions.
Students appreciated the international atmosphere of the course, which included interdisciplinary and multicultural group of lecturers and students and interaction among the learning community. Another acknowledged factor was the up-to-date course content. Students also appreciated the flexibility of e-Learning. Participation on online community emerged to be contradictory to the freedom. While heterogeneity in terms of different educational, professional and cultural backgrounds is a great advantage, heterogeneity in the level of education (bachelor, master or PhD student) and motivation to study is a challenge. Tutoring was found to be a key for enhancing e-Learning. From an institutional viewpoint the problem is that there are no formal regulations for virtual exchange and practices vary from one university to another.
To assure the course quality also in future, it is necessary 1) To seek equilibrium between temporal freedom and participation on the online community. A possibility to choose between individual and group work could be provided. 2) To use enough resources for course updating, managing, teaching and tutoring as well as to look for the tools, which maximize the efficiency of the teachers work. 3) To consider student background when developing the course. To whom is the course aimed and what is the background knowledge and motivation? 4) To improve online course cooperation in order to guarantee international interaction on the course as well as to participate on the international online course benchmarking. /Kir11
The course has been offered for five times (2006-10) and after each course realization, student feedback has been collected with an online questionnaire. In the empirical part of the thesis, student feedback was analyzed using both, qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition to the basic statistical analysis, data was classified in order to indicate factors affecting student satisfaction. The aim of the study was to describe the exceptional character of the online course and point out the development needs. Another concern was the online course cooperation with other higher education institutions.
Students appreciated the international atmosphere of the course, which included interdisciplinary and multicultural group of lecturers and students and interaction among the learning community. Another acknowledged factor was the up-to-date course content. Students also appreciated the flexibility of e-Learning. Participation on online community emerged to be contradictory to the freedom. While heterogeneity in terms of different educational, professional and cultural backgrounds is a great advantage, heterogeneity in the level of education (bachelor, master or PhD student) and motivation to study is a challenge. Tutoring was found to be a key for enhancing e-Learning. From an institutional viewpoint the problem is that there are no formal regulations for virtual exchange and practices vary from one university to another.
To assure the course quality also in future, it is necessary 1) To seek equilibrium between temporal freedom and participation on the online community. A possibility to choose between individual and group work could be provided. 2) To use enough resources for course updating, managing, teaching and tutoring as well as to look for the tools, which maximize the efficiency of the teachers work. 3) To consider student background when developing the course. To whom is the course aimed and what is the background knowledge and motivation? 4) To improve online course cooperation in order to guarantee international interaction on the course as well as to participate on the international online course benchmarking. /Kir11