Análisis longitudinal del desempeño académico de estudiantes de educación superior en un curso autónomo en línea

Abstract

E-learning implies the self-management of learning. When the virtual environment demands a high level of autonomy, it is possible to do without a teacher because the techno-educational resources are self-operated to promote learning conditions. Under these conditions, the absence of a teacher/classmates could create a perception of isolation and favour negative outcomes in the process of learning, thus, to evaluate the social presence in courses with a high level of autonomy is important to describe how and under what conditions it can affect the student’s performance. The main purpose of this study was to compare the grades of two groups enrolled in an autonomous online course; one of them got a «Minimal Social Presence» condition and the other group served as a control group. 137 college students participated, the sampling was not random and it was used a mixed factorial design 2 X 5. The factors of the research design were a) Social Presence and b) time; the dependent variable, the grades of the course were measured in five different times, to analyze the data, a mixed-factorial ANOVA design was calculated. The outcome shows that there is no interaction between time x Social Presence nor main effects of Social Presence over the grades; however, time was a significant factor to explain the variance in the evaluations. These results are discussed in terms of the scopes that autonomous courses may have and the roll of the Social Presence in learning conditions with a high level of self-management and autonomy.