‘Not another group activity!’: Student attitudes to individual and collaborative learning activities, and some implications for distance learning course design and operation

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on responses of 645 students (N = 6540) on 4 University of London (UoL) distance learning courses to a variety of course components. Published research on best practice in student learning stresses the value of active learning and of student collaboration. By contrast, our respondents report that they regard more active individual learning components such as reflection and self-assessment exercises as less helpful than course content such as readings, and they rate peer engagement much less highly than individual learning. We discuss why these learning behaviours and preferences seem to be at odds with accepted best practice, and explore possible implications for design and operation of online learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Distance learning
• course design
• learning activities
• blended learning

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the University of London Centre for Online and Distance Education, in particular to its Director Dr Linda Amrane-Cooper, for funding and supporting this work, and to the course teams and students. We also thank Emily Wilson for research support, and CDE Student Fellows Naraesa Francis and Janet Wong for their work on the interviews and learning diaries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

Ethical approval was granted on 24 October 2019 with the reference number:: SASREC_1920-443-F.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Baume

Stephen Brown was previously Head of the School of Media and Communication, Director of the International Institute for Electronic Library Research and Director of Knowledge Media Design at De Montfort University; Senior Technology Adviser at the JISC Technologies Centre; Head of Distance Learning at BT; Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in Engineering Design; and President of the Association for Learning Technology.

David Baume has since 2001 been an independent international higher education researcher, evaluator, consultant, staff and educational developer and writer. He has been a CDE Fellow since 2010. He was founding Chair of the UK Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA); co-founder of the UK Heads of Educational Development Group (HEDG); a founding council member of the International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED); and founding editor of the International Journal for Academic Development (IJAD). His contributions to academic development have been acknowledged by awards from SEDA and ICED.