Technology, time and transition in higher education : two different realities of everyday Facebook use in the first year of university in the UK.

Within the range of websites and apps that are part of first-year undergraduates’ digital environments, the social network site Facebook is perhaps the most popular and prominent. As such, the ubiquitous nature of Facebook in the higher education landscape has drawn much attention from scholars. Drawing on data from a longitudinal connective ethnography, this paper uses two ethnographic stories to explore further the realities of social media usage by newly enrolled undergraduate students in a UK university. These ethnographic stories tell two differing tales - one of connection, intent, use and organisation - the other, of disconnection, disengagement and unrealised expectations. Facebook structures students’ time at university both through connection and disconnection practices and examples of these are presented under two headings ‘I’m always on it’ and ‘Being academic’. First-year student experiences of Higher Education and social media use are not uniform, but nuanced and responsive to their specific ecosocial systems

From participation to dropout

The academic e-learning practice has to deal with various participation patterns and types of online learners with different support needs. The online instructors are challenged to recognize these and react accordingly. Among the participation patterns, special attention is requested by dropouts, which can perturbate online collaboration. Therefore we are in search of a method of early identification of participation patterns and prediction of dropouts. To do this, we use a quantitative view of participation that takes into account only observable variables. On this background we identify in a field study the participation indicators that are relevant for the course completion, i.e. produce significant differences between the completion and dropout sub-groups. Further we identify through cluster analysis four participation patterns with different support needs. One of them is the dropout cluster that could be predicted with an accuracy of nearly 80%. As a practical consequence, this study recommends a simple, easy-to-implement prediction method for dropouts, which can improve online teaching. As a theoretical consequence, we underline the role of the course didactics for the definition of participation, and call for refining previous attrition models

National student feedback surveys in distance education: An investigation at the UK Open University

National student feedback surveys are administered in a number of countries, and several encompass both campus-based and distance-learning students. The UK Open University achieves a high ranking in the annual National Student Survey (NSS), but there are some anomalies in the results. The NSS questionnaire was administered to three samples of students to explore the origins of these anomalies. The reliability and the validity of the questionnaire were satisfactory, but a substantial proportion of the respondents did not produce valid data. There was a high proportion of ‘not applicable’ responses to items concerned with learning resources and personal development. Other students responded ‘neither agree nor disagree’ to these items when ‘not applicable’ would have been more appropriate. This would have led to low rankings on these scales in the national surveys. Distance-learning institutions need to advise their students about the importance of only rating items they have actually experienced or to negotiate changes to the questionnaires themselves if they are to ensure that their activities and achievements are properly represented in national student feedback surveys