Chinese Journal of Science Education

Abstract

Distance learning over the Internet has been a hot topic as the Internet grows recently. Many educational institutions have invested a great deal of resources to build distance-learning systems though effectiveness of distance learning remains an open question. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of distance learning over the Internet. The sample in this distance-learning experiment includes students who registered in the Economics course at the Department International Trade, Chung Yuan Christian University, in the fall and spring semesters of 2000–2001. The software, “VICAS,” employed for this distance-learning experiment was developed by Hong’s Distance Learning Laboratory at National Taiwan University in 1999. The educational production function approach was adopted to evaluate the outcomes in the experiment. Two measures of students’ performance, test scores and subjective satisfaction according to the questionnaire, were chosen to represent the educational achievement level. The regression and probit models were used to investigate significance of possible factors affecting the educational achievement output. The descriptive statistics of this study show that there are 58% students agree helpfulness of learning assisted by the distance-learning course. Furthermore, it is found that pretest scores, numbers of students’ logins, learning attitude, and ownership of personal-use computer do have significant influences on the probability of students’ answers on helpfulness of the distance-learning experiment. Interestingly, only the coefficient of pretest scores in regressions are significantly different from zero among the possible independent variables mentioned above.

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