Abstract:

Digital transformation in education is becoming increasingly widespread as a trend in the development of a digital society. The COVID19 pandemic has also played a positive role in the advancement of digital transformation in education. Compared with traditional face-to-face classroom education, digital education requires delivering both instructions and learning materials in a digital way. There are various studies comparing the merits and demerits of digital education with traditional education, and the conclusions are divided regarding which one is superior. To help provide more evidence in this regard, we carried out this study investigating the impact on student performance from both mode of instruction and type of learning material. We investigated about 500 freshman students participating in a non-majors course of information science at a national public university in Japan. We divided the students into two groups and gave face-to-face classroom lectures to the first group whereas video lectures to the second group. The instructions were given by the same instructor and the time for learning was almost the same. We investigated student performance and level of satisfaction by using a quiz at the end of each chapter and a questionnaire at the end of the course. We found that over 80% students in the second group had rewound the video and probably due to that reason, the second group students achieved higher scores than the first group. Though the first group evaluated high about the lecturing style and passion of the instructor, level of satisfaction between the two groups was similar. In addition, we found that students in the second group who had accessed more digital materials than the video tend to show better performance than the others. The findings suggest that providing students with digital materials is a good way of offering relearning opportunities, which would make up for being less concentrated in classroom learning. Apart from videos, digital materials such as message board and reference answers are also found to be effective for helping student improve performance.

Keywords:

Digital transformation in education, digital learning material, mode of instruction, student learning performance, level of satisfaction.