Poster #15 - Spatiotemporal Performance Factors and Online Learning: What Predicts Successful Anytime, Anywhere Education?

• In Event: 25.087 - MTCC Poster Session Four
  In Poster Session: 25.087-3 - Distance and Online Education

Abstract

Notions of “anytime, anywhere” education for online courses are touted amongst today’s universities and learners alike, but at what costs to effective learning? The study reveals an examination of two measures, time entropy and location entropy, to characterize students’ physical spatio-temporal contexts in an online course. Researchers analyzed 5,293 students’ spatio-temporal patterns and found the high location entropy-high time entropy (i.e. anytime, anywhere) was the lowest performing group when compared with other students. When adding gender and major as factors, results also indicated that female students in this sample who participated at a fixed location or over few locations achieved the highest scores on the final exam. Implications and limitations of the research are discussed.

Authors

• Xu Du, Central China Normal University

• Mingyan Zhang, Central China Normal University

• Brett E. Shelton, Boise State University

• Jui-Long Hung, Boise State University