Proceedings of The 5th World Conference on Research in Education
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Adult Learners in digital environment: What they think about it
Maria de Fátima Goulão
ABSTRACT:
Online learning started being seen as an ally helping people to combine their personal and professional life. Since digital learning environments have such an important role it is important to know how users evaluate it. Our goal was to learn, in a generic way, how satisfied students are, and in more detail how they evaluate the environment in six different vectors. We have a total of 70 online students and the age average is 40,8 years (SD = 9,04). From our sample 65,8% claim they have an individual study plan and from that, the majority (27,4%) claims to dedicate four to six hours per week to study. We used the Distance Education Learning Environments Survey (DELES) to collect our data. The general reliability analysis is .926. The results point for a Clear Agreement and a high consensus regarding the ideas presented. The scale Student Interaction and Collaboration seems to be the one with less consensus and lower mark. Meaning the work between students isn’t very common. Regardless of their different opinions, this group of students shows a high level of consensus between the other sub-scales. From the results we can say that this group of students are satisfied with their online course. We can conclude that it is necessary to work on the student interaction and collaboration between each other, to help them grow their practices of study. We should also analyse less positive aspects and find a solution that helps us prevent dropouts.
keywords: Adult learner, Digital environment, Dropout, Lifelong learning, Student Satisfaction .