Investigating students’ need for e-learning at university

Annisa Ho, Paul Lam and Carmel McNaught
Centre for Learning Enhancement And Research
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China

It is a common view that students are able to use and are using many digital devices in their everyday life. Terms such as the ‘Net generation’, ‘digital natives’ or the ‘Y generation’ are used to describe these young people who have ‘spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age’ (Prenksy 2001, 1). Studies in Australia, the USA and the UK by Kennedy et al. (2006), Kvavik (2005) and Green and Hannon (2007) respectively confirm in general that the vast majority of students have ready access to web-enabled personal computers and own personal digital devices such as mobile phones. They also use a wide range of digital features and Web features in their everyday lives for communication (e.g. emails, msn) or for forming social networks (e.g. blogging, Facebook). A recent study at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) conducted by the Centre for Learning Enhancement and Research illustrated that our students are also in the Net generation and are ‘digitally ready’: they are very familiar with information and communication technologies. For example, a vast majority of the students have broadband Internet access and mobile phones; and nearly all of them use digital methods to communicate — they use emails, read and comment on blogs, and use social networking software.

There are expectations that the Net generation can readily use technology in learning, and would welcome or even expect quite different educational environments and strategies from their predecessors. Also, there may be a mismatch between the learning preferences of the students and their teachers who adopt a traditional set of teaching strategies. Prensky (2001), for example, labelled teachers in higher education as ‘digital immigrants’ and late acquirers of the technology; and he considered the large gap between the ICT experiences of current students and teachers as the ‘the biggest single problem facing education today’ (p. 2). But is teachers’ readiness and skill in using technology to teach the only factor in e-adoption in education?

There is no strong empirical evidence that students’ are committed to e-learning — on the contrary, challenges to the use of technology in teaching and learning have been reported, for example, by McNaught et al. (2006) who found that many e-learning strategies lack student support. This paper reports a preliminary study held in a Business Department in one of the local universities in an attempt to understand students’ perspectives on using technology to assist teaching and learning. The evaluation instruments used included focus group meetings and the administration of a survey. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find that the Net generation demands technology in the teaching and learning environment. This may mean that the interests and needs of a digital life cannot be easily transferred to the educational setting, or that students’ needs are influenced by their previous experience in similar activities. Many of the students remarked that the use of the technology is still not a common practice in the department.