Volume Two - Academic Conferences

2. Method
2.1 Fully on-line learning course
Minoru Nakayama et al.
The notes taken by students were evaluated during an Information Systems Network course which was
a fully online course given to undergraduate students in Economics at a Japanese national university.
The online learning course consisted of modules with lecture videos, slides and online tests.
Participants were asked to study one module every week, and take notes from the online learning
materials without any printed materials and face-to-face sessions being provided. The learning pace
was set by the lecturer so that students needed to complete one module per week. For each session,
students were encouraged to take an on-line test, which was a function of the learning management
system (LMS). Also, weekly confirmation tests with a proctor were conducted to monitor their progress.
Both the final scores of online tests and the weekly confirmation test scores for every module were
recorded and used in determining final grades (Nakayama et al. 2010).
Though students were not obligated to take notes, these were a necessary requirement for answering
questions in online tests. It was also necessary to review notes before joining the weekly confirmation
test sessions in the classroom. The students took notes of the lectures given and the slides presented.
Instructions and guidance were not provided to the participants, in order to maintain the impartiality of
the survey.
2.2 Note-taking assessment
At the weekly test sessions, participants were required to present their notebooks. The lecturer
reviewed and assessed these notes during the test, then returned them to students afterwards.
The contents of the slides presented by the lecturers can be used as a comparison standard for
student’s notes of each module, and can be used to evaluate these notes.
The contents of students' notes were evaluated using a 5-point scale (0-4), 4:Good, 3:Fair, 2:Poor,
1:Delayed, 0:Not presented (Nakayama et al. 2010). If a student reproduced the same information in his
or her notebook, note-taking was rated as ``Fair''. ``Fair'' note-taking is the through reproduction of
information given. If any information was omitted, a “Poor” rating was given. In a sense, ``Poor''
note-takers failed to completely reproduce the information transmitted completely. When students
wrote down additional information from the lecture, the note-taking was rated as ``Good''. The ``Good''
note-takers included those who integrated the knowledge given in the lecture with relevant prior
knowledge (Mayer et al. 1990), as some of this is are related to each other, and some of the knowledge
given in the lecture is related to relevant prior knowledge. At this point, several kinds of constructivistic
learning activities were occurring (Tynajälä 1999; Tam 2000).
The total number of valid participants in the courses was 54.
2.3 Characteristics of students
In this study, student's characteristics were measured using three constructs. These constructs were:
personality (Goldberg 1999; IPIP 2004), information literacy (Fujii 2007) and learning experience
(Nakayama et al. 2007). Personality: A very popular psychological characteristic of humans is
personality. To observe the personalities of students, the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP)
inventory (IPIP 2004) was used. This five factor personality model was proposed by Goldberg
(Goldberg 1999), and provides five component scores: ``Extroversion'', ``Agreeableness'',
``Conscientiousness'', ``Neuroticism'' and ``Openness to Experience''.
Information literacy: Information literacy inventories were defined and developed by Fujii (2007) to
measure information literacy. The survey consists of 32 question items, and 8 factors emerge from
these questions as follows: interest and motivation, fundamental operational ability, information
collecting ability, mathematical thinking (reasoning) ability, information control ability, applied
operational ability, attitude, and knowledge and understanding. These 8 factors can be summarized as
two secondary factors: operational skills and attitudes toward information literacy (Nakayama et al.
2008). The validity of applying this metric to university students has been confirmed (Fujii 2007).
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