Distance education via the Internet: the student experience

This is the second in a series of papers that describes the use of the Inte rnet on a distance-taught undergraduate Computer Science course (Thomas et at, 1998), This paper examines students' experience of a large-scale trial in which students were taught using electronic communication exclusively. T he paper compares the constitution and experiences of a group of Internet s tudents to those of conventional distance learning students on the same cou rse. Learning styles, background questionnaires, and learning outcomes were used in the comparison of the two groups. The study reveals comparable lea rning outcomes with no discrimination in grade as the result of using diffe rent communication media, The student experience is reported, highlighting the main gains and issues of using the Internet as a communication medium i n distance education. This paper also shows that using the Internet in this context can provide students with a worthwhile experience.