February 2001 — Features
Print this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Evaluating Distance Education Across Twelve Time Zones
professional - - - - - - amateurish
Questions 26-30 asked students to further evaluate various aspects of the instructional delivery system by indicating how they felt about five carefully-worded statements using a Likert Scale. For each question they were to indicate whether they "strongly agreed," "agreed," had "no opinion," "disagreed," or "strongly disagreed" with the statement. These questions' results are shown in Table 1.
In four of the five questions, responses spanned the entire range from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree," and the range in the other question spanned four of the five possible responses. Thus, we may conclude that there is either a wide range of opinions about these statements or a wide range of misunderstandings about what these statements meant. We would therefore caution against analyzing these responses too critically, but one can see that students tended to agree with each statement.
The next set of questions attempted to get at students' thoughts about the SMA Instructional Delivery System using a Semantic Differential. As in the Likert Scale questions, student responses to the questions in this section spanned a wide range, but they tended to be grouped a little more strongly than they were for the Likert Scale questions. We may be able to put a little more weight on these responses, but again we would caution against interpreting these results too strongly.
The survey presented six Semantic Differential items, each with six possible positions between them.
| Table 1. Responses to survey questions 27-31 | SA | A | NO | D | SD |
| 27. I found that information presented using PowerPoint slides (or other professional visual techniques) was cleared than information presented using blackboards or whiteboards. | 9 | 25 | 16 | 9 | 1 |
| 28. I found that I learned better when the presenter used a blackboard or whiteboard than when he or she used PowerPoint or other professional visual techniques. | 3 | 25 | 17 | 14 | 1 |
| 29. It is important to me that the videos are available online within one working day of the live lecture. | 15 | 25 | 15 | 5 | 1 |
| 30. I learned as much from this course as I would have if it were taught locally at my campus. | 8 | 25 | 10 | 15 | 2 |
| 31. The scueduling or early morning and late afternoon classes was a problem for me. | 5 | 28 | 14 | 13 | 0 |
