Abstract:

It appears that online learning has become an indelible part of the education system. It becomes more and more popular not only as a supporting part for ‘traditional’ full-time and part-time study programs but also in the case where it is the only possibility to study. PJAIT has extensive experience in designing and running online studies, our Edu system has been evolving steadily from 2011. We developed and successfully implemented our own educational platform. We have been moving away from the original approach focused on a course, towards a system centered around a student and his/her educational (learning) resources. The e-learning platform is assuming a new function – in addition to being an organizing structure. This new function is a PLE – a Personal Learning Environment of the student, which hosts his/her e-portfolio and e-learning materials from the Academy’s repository. We have also integrated the e-learning platform with other systems along the lines of the novel concept of remote communication within our organization.

Bearing in mind that e-learning is increasing in popularity, it is necessary to monitor the quality of the system, the didactic materials, and teaching methodology. Conclusion must be drawn regarding necessary changes in order to further enhance the learning experience and its outcome.

During the last few years we have focused our attention not only to develop our system but also to analyze its quality. This paper is a continuation of the last two papers where the results of this investigation were presented.

The first paper presents e-learning environment and e-learning project realized at our Academy. In the second one, we evaluated e-learning study, taking into account the opinion of students about e-learning platform, didactic materials, the mode of studies which is preferred and method of course delivery. We noticed that blended learning is increasingly popular among full-time stationary students.

The aim of this paper is to investigate effectiveness of education for the students from different modes of study: e-learning, full-time and part-time study program. It was easy to make such comparison because PJAIT offers all three modes. We compare the results obtained for the different groups of the subjects: specialization subjects such as fundamentals of Java programming, database systems, software project management; basic subjects, such as algebra and additional subjects such as Japanese history and culture. The differences between the average marks obtained for each subject in these three modes are not significant so we went to the conclusion that e-learning studies fulfill requirements for academic studies and are comparable with the other modes. Additional advantage for online studies is that they teach self-reliance, regularity and cause to increase motivation to work. We are sure that all these features are very important not only during studying but also they will be helpful in the future work of our graduates.

Keywords:

e-learning, effectiveness and quality investigation, comparison of different mode of study.