Navigating the Digital Landscape: Assessing the Effects of E-Learning on Students’ Learning in Higher Education
A. Bouaaich and L. Belhaj
The inevitable digital revolution, which would call for necessary changes in order to meet the new needs of society, has led distance education to the developed states in line with technological innovations. But distance learning is often criticized for its lower success rates and negative results on learners’ learning, even if its advocates argue for its role in the social opening of higher education. This research proposes to study the effects of distance learning on university students’ learning, the challenges, and the prospects. It is based on the statistical exploitation of a questionnaire survey. In its design, we have adopted an evaluative approach to the achievement of training objectives, the conduct of courses, and teaching practices. The case of Master 1 educational technology and pedagogical innovation students, which allows us to identify a sub-sample of distance students. To do this it was more important to bring the same type of survey to a category of the same characteristics but from a face-to-face teaching, in order to explore the results of satisfaction in each mode of teaching and establish answers to our research problem. From the results of the quantitative analysis, we found that in face-to-face learning students are more satisfied with their learning than in distance learning. The results show that the satisfaction gap is not very large, which explains why distance learning students are moderately satisfied with their learning, especially since they do not plead a practical insufficiency of the teachers. In addition to an average satisfaction with the course, including ambiguous results regarding the clarity of the course plan, and the management of space, and even an insufficiency at the level of communication, which leads to the lack of human contact (teacher/student) expressed by these students. Nevertheless, we observe that distance learning has only partially impacted the learning of the M1 educational technology and pedagogical innovation students.