Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Telelearning: A Case Study ...

on a course that I go to class. But that's on the course time itself, but if I
take into account my travel time and everything else … (student B)
At least one student could not participate fully in the course due to their time
constraints:
I noticed that some people seem to be able to commit a vast amount of
time to responding and questioning and communicating with others in the
class online and it was all I could do to keep up with the reading. I just
didn't have time. I barely found that I had time to get into my own work
and my research and contribute what I thought minimally. There were
some people who seemed just to be able to comment on everyone's work
and I was doing my best to read what they had written and write my own.
Again, I am not sure if that is an online issue or if that's just a part-time
student with a full-time job [issue]… I did not participate online as much
as I might have in class. I didn't because of the time. The time to write a
thoughtful response would have started to push more than I was preparing
to give to the course … I had felt that there were areas that I would have
really liked to have explored further but I limited my topic. I just set a
practical goal of completing the course. I took it not so much as a
researcher but as a student. My main objective was completing the
course. That was just my own attempt to be practical. (student A)
Technical troubles did pose a time constraint for a few students, especially during
the first week of the course. Fortunately, as indicated by the quotes below, those
interruptions were not too long or too often:
Technical trouble yes - the assistance group had been notified of my
various but not recurring troubles...The impact has been lost time on
course work, and lost work and editorials. It's very frustrating when it
happens. (student 14)
Technical difficulties - A week in the beginning, it was probably two or
three hours a week in total, but then that of course fell off to nothing at the
end because someone would post a question and somebody else in the
class would answer it before I got to it. (instructor 1)
Only two students reported traveling to campus for this course, one 3 hours per
week, the other 9 hours per week. Since the course itself is entirely online, one could
speculate that the travel was to conduct research in the library to use towards their
proposal development. Eight of 9 students responding indicated that they came to
campus less often due to the technology used in this course. In addition, students
generally believed the value of the course outweighed the time demands associated with
completing it.
Delivery Method. Students were asked to comment on three statements about
how the delivery method (online) related to their learning experience: 1. "Using
technology in this course helps me learn with greater depth of understanding.", 2.
"Using technology in this course helps me learn more relevant information.", and 3. "I
can learn better using print materials than by working on a computer." Table 22 provides
these results:
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