The perception of part-time students in on-line education: an exploratory study

The introduction of on-line or web-based teaching and learning is becoming an increasingly important part of higher education (Ngai, Poon & Chan, 2007). On-line interactive distance learning tends to be the future direction of learning because the literature on future learning tends to promote global learning from different places, plus this mode of learning seeks to motivate interactions between students, and between students and the instructor, in the pursuit of improved knowledge based construction (Kochtanek & Hein, 2000). This paper analyses the part-time business students' perceptions of an on-line/interactive/distance learning unit via the Blackboard platform. The emergence of the Internet has become a major force and a trend in higher education with many schools or disciplines experimenting with different forms of on-line instructions. An important factor that has been largely ignored is how students feel about on-line learning courses or units? This study discovered that students have appeared to like and accept on-line unit as an alternative to the traditional classroom face-to-face learning unit. Simultaneously, students appear to value using a technology support tool such as the 'Blackboard' to facilitate their part-time studies. Further research is needed to expand the scope of this paper and to see whether these results can be generalised in other university settings. As it appears that on-line instruction is going to become part of college experience, future research is needed to understand about the use of new voice concept for Blackboard instruction and its use for better learning or replacement of traditional face-to-face classroom concept.