Abstract:

It is, nowadays, broadly, assumed that the emphasis on the student with regard to the design and implementation of educational programs is associated with better learning outcomes. To consider students’ individual differences such as learning preferences or learning styles, in course design adds complexity in the process. There are many, sometimes contradicting, approaches in personalizing course design aiming to address student variability, which, certainly, contribute to a better understanding of the learning process and the effective adoption of modern educational methods. Likewise, in the field of distance education many questions arise about the effectiveness of various approaches and the role that learning styles might play. In the context of this work, we present a study on the correlation of learning styles and the students' views on asynchronous distance learning. A course in the curriculum of the Department of Mechanical Engineering Educators was taught entirely asynchronously. The course was evaluated by the students, at the end of the semester, using a questionnaire based on criteria related to the content, perceived usefulness and satisfaction. In order to examine the extent to which students' learning styles were related to the results of the course evaluation, the Feldman Index was chosen, as best suited to engineering students. The method of processing the Feldman Questionnaire answers has been modified to obtain quantitative results which can be mathematically correlated with the results of the course evaluation. In this way it was possible to identify strong correlations between Sequential-Global dimension of the Feldman Index and specific elements of the evaluation. It was also found that its other dimensions demonstrated weak and very weak correlations with specific elements of the evaluation, thus suggesting that perhaps only a subset of learning styles actually affects students’ perceptions on the evaluation of asynchronous learning.

Keywords:

Learning Styles, Feldman Index, Quantitative Correlation, Asynchronous Distance Learning.