Abstract:

Development of the Internet and the coronavirus pandemic are making online learning increasingly important. Though many studies have investigated the effectiveness of online learning itself, investigation about the relations between time of online learning, learning performance, field of study, and student gender in higher education has been made to a less extent. In this study, we investigated about 400 undergraduate students participating in a freshman-level non-majors course of information science at a national public university in Japan. We created and provided the students with a pdf textbook and digital material via a website and let the students learn by themselves at their own pace. The students could ask the instructor questions via a message board, but no face-to-face instructions were given. We investigated student learning performance by asking them to complete an untimed open-note quiz located at the end of each chapter. We checked the length of time every student accessed the website where the material and message board were provided. We then investigated the relations between this time, performance in the quizzes, field of study, and student gender. We found that students spending more time accessing the website tend to perform better in the quizzes. We also found that arts students spent much more time accessing the website and slightly outperformed science students in the quizzes, and that female students spent more time accessing the website and outperformed male students. The findings indicate that arts students need more time than science students to understand and master science-field contents but spending more time on learning can eventually remove the difference in performance between them and science students. It also suggests that untimed online learning and untimed assessment can help arts students improve performance in assessments in a science course.

Keywords:

Untimed online learning, asynchronous online learning, independent learning, untimed assessment, arts students and science students.