Evaluating the Impact of Socio-economic and Demographic Factors on Selected Aspects of E- Learning in Public Administration Education

Nowadays blended learning is very popular in higher education. Enrolled in e-courses, students form opinions on different aspects of e-learning. In our study, we focused on assessing such aspects from the students’ perspective and explored differences between subgroups, based on socio-demographic characteristics of students in public administration programmes. The empirical results show that students’ attitudes to blended learning increase significantly by year of study and decrease according to the amount of other activities. In addition, the results indicate that the main challenge of the faculty management and teachers is to increase the engagement of first-year students regarding the work in e-courses. Introduction The growth of information and communication technology (ICT) is bringing rapid and significant changes to the development of teaching and learning techniques. E-learning is emerging as the new paradigm of modern education (Sun, Tsai, Finger, Chen, & Yeh, 2008). The rise in the usage of e-learning in the last two decades is due to the tougher competition between higher education institutions to attract students and meet their educational needs and goals (Clark & Meyer, 2011) and to support both face-to-face and remote course delivery without the constraints of time and distance (Park, 2009). Despite the popularity of online education, attrition remains a problem faced by many institutions (Hart, 2012; Saba, 2012; Upadhyaya & Mallik, 2013). The effectiveness of e-learning systems (Hart, 2012; Hassanzadeh, Kanaani, & Elahi, 2012; Islam, Rahim, Liang, & Momtaz, 2011; Mbarek & Zaddem, 2013) and students’ perceived satisfaction (Al-Adwan, Al-Adwan, & Smedley, 2013; Joo, Joung, & Son, 2014; Kassab, Al-Shafei, Salem, & Otoom, 2015; Liaw, 2007; Lim, Ayesh, & Chee, 2013; Ozkan & Koseler, 2009; Sun et al., 2008) have been important subjects of research in the last few decades. Many factors influence the effectiveness of e-learning, with some being connected with technology/technics and others with people. Upadhyaya and Mallik (2013) claim that elearning involves interaction between people and processes, meaning that it has to be treated as a socio-technical system rather than a social system only considering the people aspect (e.g., students, teachers and other stakeholders) or a technical system only considering the standards and processes aspect (e.g., course content, technology, Learning Management System (LMS), content management tools). E-learning is a complex process that depends not only on these aspects in isolation, but also the interaction among them. A successful e-learning system must at least be designed with good and adequate program content, which is presented well and can be accessed easily, and allows high user participation and involvement in the virtual learning environment (Lim et al., 2013). A web-based learning system is considered to be successful if it can replicate classroom experience and consider the students’ needs (Sanchez-Franco, 2010). If students refuse to use the system, its benefits will not be fully exploited ICICTE 2016 Proceedings 299 (Tarhini, Hone, & Liu, 2013). Additionally, although the Internet may be considered a global technology, the efficiency of e-learning tools should be measured locally as users typically work in local/national contexts (Teo, 2011). Besides understanding the students’ psychological aspects of learning in blended learning, it is very important to monitor and understand how students themselves perceive different aspects of e-courses and how they feel when using teaching materials and learning in an e-course. As the latter is designed by a teacher, this kind of assessment could be understood as a student evaluation of teaching (SET). SET is important for two primary reasons. First, student evaluation provides data used for managerial decisions such as tenure, promotion, and salary increases. Second, teaching evaluations provide feedback to help teachers improve their future teaching performance (Loveland, 2007; Sheehan & DuPrey, 1999). The rapid growth in the number of online classes poses some challenges for academic management. They include difficulties hiring teachers with online teaching interests and experience, increased costs associated with technology, training and faculty incentives, and problems associated with the comparison of traditional and online teaching in terms of workload, compensation and evaluation (Loveland, 2007). In any case, teachers should themselves be interested in the feedback from students – in order to improve the e-courses and students’ engagement within them. When students are provided with the same LMS and learn in the same e-courses, not everyone has the same perception of a specific aspect of work in the e-course and a general impression about it. It is therefore important to understand that variations between genders, location of students’ homes, years of study, occupation with other activities, participation in different programmes and students’ high school backgrounds exist and should not be ignored when developing e-courses. Lim et al. (2013) offered similar reasoning where the focus was on students’ perceptions of LMS design and the socio-demographic factors, such as role, gender, experience and age, influencing those perceptions and by Wu and Liu (2013) in whose research there were differences in the satisfaction with blended learning between postgraduate and undergraduate students. In our study, we analysed the students’ points of view on different aspects of the ecourses in which they were enrolled. We examined the results, received from students of two undergraduate programmes at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Public Administration, where LMS Moodle is used for e-learning, and linked them with the socio-demographic characteristics of the surveyed students. The latter were acquired from the student databases. The purpose of the paper is to present the analysis of the socio-demographic factors influencing students’ assessment of aspects of each e-course. The paper explains which socio-demographic factors influence the students’ perceptions of e-courses and discusses the variances between the different subgroups of students. The paper is structured as follows: after the introduction, which includes defining the problem, the purpose and structure of the paper as well as a brief literature review on different aspects of blended learning and factors affecting them, the results of an empirical study are presented. At the end, conclusions are offered based on the ICICTE 2016 Proceedings 300 examined data. They are accompanied by the limitations of the presented study and the plans for our future research.