Understanding Students’ Use of Online Learning Tools through Online Learning Readiness Assessment

Abstract

Understanding the readiness of students to undertake online education has been viewed as a necessary precursor to ensuring their success in an online learning environment. To serve this purpose, a number of Online Learning Readiness (OLR) assessment tools have been developed. However, the relationship between the students’ readiness, assessed by these tools, and the actual online learning outcomes has not been well established. This chapter presents a study that assesses the Online Learning Readiness (OLR) of a sample group of postgraduate engineering students and determines whether there is any association between the level of readiness and the extent to which the students use online learning tools. The research employed a questionnaire survey targeting a group of postgraduate students undertaking a project management course at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Based on the survey data from 30 valid responses, it was found that the sampled students had different levels of OLR and can be clustered into three main groups: developed, less-developed, and developing OLR, and that the higher level of OLR can be associated with more extensive use of online learning tools.