Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 53, Issue 3, November 2009, Pages 742-748
Computers & Education

Finnish high school students’ readiness to adopt online learning: Questioning the assumptions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.04.014Get rights and content

Abstract

The Finnish high school system in rural areas is facing challenges because of a decreasing number of the students. This situation places new emphasis on online learning. Online learning offers new possibilities for high schools to provide equal learning opportunities for their students. This paper explores students’ readiness to adapt their studying habits in the networked high schools by outlining their beliefs about online learning. Beliefs are assumed to direct people’s actions, in this case activities concerning studying online. Three hundred second year high school students from Eastern Finland who had not had the experiences of learning online were studied. The findings suggest that students polarize into negative, neutral and positive groups based on their beliefs concerning online learning. Results also indicate that students’ knowledge about the possibilities of online learning is quite superficial. In contrast to theories about collaborative learning practices, students see online learning rather differently. Students with negative and neutral beliefs especially see online learning merely as a static “warehouse” of materials and study-alone learning tasks instead of offering possibilities for collaborative knowledge building.

Introduction

The Finnish high school system in rural areas is adapting to a decreasing number of students. The reasons for the decrease are migration of people to urban areas, decreasing birth rate and students leaving the high school system to take up vocational courses. Small schools are under pressure to reduce the range of courses they offer, and this favors larger high schools with their greater variety of courses. Eventually, the decrease in student numbers puts small schools at risk of closure. Information and communication technology (ICT), especially online courses, is seen as one solution to this problem. Networking of schools and collaboration in teaching provide possibilities for shared courses.

The important roles of ICT and online learning in Finnish education are underlined in the renewed National Curriculum which stresses upon supporting the development of students’ multifaceted ICT skills: ICT should be used in education from comprehensive schools through high schools to universities simultaneously with curricular revision. The final high school matriculation examination has been renewed to encompass several new individual subjects instead of a combined examination in so called humanistic subjects. This change has created a demand for more courses in the individual subjects at deeper and more applied levels and this creates a problem in smaller schools where there are not enough students to participate. Changes in the population structure have been acknowledged in the strategies of the Ministry of Education (Ministry of Education, 2008). Equal access to high school education throughout the country has been named as one of the most important goals in education policies. In the Ministry of Education strategies, online learning has been suggested as one way to reach this goal.

All these changes are predicated on the assumption that students are ready to embrace online learning, that because they are of the ‘digital native generation’ and engage in social networking they have transferable skills and a disposition to work in online environments. This paper questions this assumption. It explores high school students’ readiness to adapt their learning habits in the networked high schools by investigating their beliefs about aspects of online learning.

The context of this paper is the collaboration between a university team undertaking in-service training and follow-up research and the European Social Fund Eastern Finland Educational Network (EFEN) project (ISOverkosto in Finnish). The project was established to develop collaboration in a network of high schools starting with 36 institutions and expanding to 67 with three institutes providing vocational education. From the beginning of the project the aim of schools in the network was to offer and acquire online courses through the EFEN project. The project has developed a course supply system using online environments, usually Moodle, and an online learning objects repository.

Section snippets

Factors affecting students’ readiness for online learning

There are many factors that affect students’ use of ICT and readiness to learn online. In this study we concentrate on beliefs, self-efficacy and ICT skills. We also take account of what the literature on students’ experiences of online learning leads us to expect.

Research subjects

The target group of the study was second year high school students (aged 17–18 years) from 36 high schools in the EFEN project. An online questionnaire was sent to schools in the autumn of 2005. The intention was that one class of students from each school would fill in the questionnaire in school time. This would have yielded a sample of about 1300. We received 337 responses. Although all schools were part of the EFEN project, 37 students mentioned that they had earlier experiences of learning

Subscales of students’ beliefs about online learning

In the first phase, principal component analysis was used to transform the original variables into condensed variables in order to simplify the set (Afifi & Clark, 1996). The principal component analysis of students’ beliefs about online learning and ICT skills produced seven components (Table 1).

Result concerning online learning produced five principal components: (i) self-efficacy, (ii) the importance of online learning, (iii) intentional, (iv) ‘isolated’ and (v) collaborative, the last three

Discussion and conclusion

Beliefs and attitudes are assumed to influence people’s choices and actions, in this study students’ readiness to embrace online learning. Only a few studies have addressed students’ readiness, that is, before the students have real online learning experiences. In this study half of the students (140) had rather neutral beliefs about online learning, a quarter (60) had quite negative beliefs, and a quarter (56) had positive beliefs. Results also indicate that the differences of ICT skills

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