Author: Jonatan Castaño Muñoz
Programme: Doctoral Programme on the Information and Knowledge Society
Language: Spanish
Supervisors: Dr Josep M. Duart Montoliu and Dr Teresa Sancho Vinuesa
Faculty / Institute: Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3)
Subjects: Education and Teaching Operations and Management, Higher Education, Universities
Key words: Internet, Higher education, e-learning, Blended learning, Interaction, Effectiveness, Education production, Equality, Digital divide, Propensity score matching, e-surveys
Area of knowledge: Education research and Diagnosis Methods, Sociology
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Summary
The rise in the use of the Internet in higher education poses a series of challenges to ensure that this technology contributes optimally to improving students' learning.
The economic theory of education production highlights the importance of including the Internet as productive input in the most effective and efficient way. The sociological theory of the digital divide highlights the importance of including it in such a way that no group of students is excluded. On the basis of these two perspectives, the principal aim of this thesis is to identify the elements that lead to an effective and non-exclusive inclusion of the Internet in higher education. This general aim has been divided into four sub-objectives:
- To compare the effectiveness of the use of the Internet in education on interactive learning with that of the use of the Internet in education for individual learning.
- To study the variation of the benefits of the use of the Internet on interaction in learning according to the degree of intensity of this interaction.
- To study the differentiated effects of the use of the Internet on interaction in learning.
- To study the determinants of the use of the Internet for interaction in learning.
To meet these aims, data from a sample of over 17,000 students from three Catalan universities (one online and two on-site) were used. For this reason, information reduction techniques have been used to prepare variables, and in the more analytical part, regression models have been estimated, correcting the selection bias and the intra-class correlation.
The results obtained show that:
- Using the Internet to carry out interactive learning is effective in improving academic performance. However, using it on expository learning has no impact on academic results.
- The productivity of online interaction in learning follows different models in online universities and on-site universities. In the former it follows the law of diminishing returns, whereas it does not in the latter, due to an initial stage of adaptation to the medium.
- There are conditions that determine the success of the use of the Internet to interact in learning. These include the organizational element and the user skills of the students.
- Despite being detected as a positive use for improving academic performance, not all students use the Internet for interaction with the same intensity. Utility is an explanatory variable of usage, but beyond this, there are other variables such as motivation for studying, previous uses of the Internet outside the educational context, or socio-demographic characteristics that draw the map of causes of the existing inequality of use.
The thesis discusses the implications that these results have for education policies and proposes strategies to include the Internet in education in a more effective and egalitarian way.