NON-ATTENDANCE FACTORS – CAN E-LEARNING BE CONSIDERED A DISINCENTIVE?

Abstract

E-learning has become a widely accepted phenomenon that offers plethora of advantages to pupils, students as well as teaching staff. It is successfully utilized in academia and professional environments both in pure and blended forms. A number of studies focus on successful implementations of virtual learning environments and courses as well as investigate the challenges that the teams responsible for carrying out such implementations may come across and handle. E-learning capabilities that have been delivered successfully might potentially have a negative effect on the overall teaching process. It is students’ non-attendance in classroom-based activities that is one of the possible issues related to the wide application of e-learning. Within this contribution, authors discuss the issue of non-attendance and support it with preliminary results of a survey carried out within higher education entities. Non-attendance factors that were identified during workshops are subsequently verified in the course of a questionnaire survey. The survey involved 91 students with extensive e-learning experience, recruited from three separate educational entities, two of which represented private sector, and one – public sector. The forms were distributed and the responses were collected electronically via Google Forms service. The contribution sheds some light on the mechanics behind students’ non-attendance and its root causes – which include, but are not limited to, other commitments, absentia driven by the intensity of the teaching process as well as logistical and financial challenges. The results of the study prove that e-learning – owing to its confirmed viability as an alternative to the real-life educational activities – has an attendance-threatening potential. It primarily affects theoretical knowledge transfer in this respect, yet it tends to remain neutral regarding the attendance in strictly practice-oriented components of technical courses.