Principios de resolución de disputas (estándares)

To gather subjective attitude data for the work conducted for this study and to measure students‟ perception of the three dimensions as presented in the previous section, a 39-item, 5-point Likert scale questionnaire was designed. The questionnaire was designed to measure students‟ attitude toward using WebCT, Learner dimension, Technology dimension, and Instructor dimension. Above it was pointed out that Likert scales are used for measuring opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and have been widely used for evaluating user satisfaction with products. Coolican (1994) stated that there are a number of advantages of using the Likert technique as it is easy to complete and keeps the respondents direct involvement and it has been shown to have a high degree of validity and reliability. Scales usually range from 1 to 3 points, to a maximum of 1 to 9 points, but it is generally agreed that taking the middle ground, by using scales of 1 to 5, or 1 to 7 is the most effective method (Dix et al. 2004). For the work reported in this thesis, it was therefore decided to use a scale of 1 to 5, as follows:

Strongly agree

Agree Neutral Disagree Strongly disagree

It is important to consistently label the scales because it gives a direction of agreement and more reliable, so that, for example, a „1‟ always indicates low agreement, while a „5‟ always indicates high agreement.

A central issue for scientific research is reliability and validity. Reliability refers to the consistency in the results of the measurement, while validity concerns whether the questionnaire measures what it claims to be measuring (Brinkman, 2009). To find the degree to which the questionnaire measured what it was designed to

85 measure, it was evaluated through a process of content validity. Content validity addresses the question whether the full content of a construct is represented in the measure or have some dimensions been left out. Content validity is a consensus issue. For content validity, experts have to agree that the construct has been applied capturing all aspects of the construct (Brinkman, 2009).

This process involved asking colleagues with an expert knowledge of the domain to evaluate the content of the questionnaire to ensure that the items were representative of the area that they were supposed to cover, and were not weighted towards specific aspects of the area.

A 39-item questionnaire was sent via email to experts at different universities. The questions were collected from related literature. This process was conducted with 11 experts. The experts are academic researchers working in related areas such as e- learning environments and educational software. The purpose of the questionnaire and what it was designed to measure was explained. The experts rated each question as “Essential, Useful but not essential, and Not necessary”. Also they wrote their comments and suggestions. Items that were rated as Essential from more than 5 experts were used in the questionnaire. The comments were used in forming some of the questions and the questions that measure the same variable were deleted. This process resulted in a total of 30 questionnaire items. These items were then divided into two groups of equal numbers of positively and negatively worded statements, in order to prevent bias effects caused by a respondents‟ tendency to habitually agree or disagree with the statements.

Some statements were found to be not necessary to be in the questionnaire from the experts such as:

U-link needs a lot of improvement

Receiving responses to my questions in timely manners motivated me to use the communication board.

The instructor regularly monitored the discussions I feel confident printing materials from the Internet. I believe that using U-link requires technical ability

86 I believe that using U-link is only advisable for people with a lot of

patience

The fact that I had to use U-link for this module is a source of annoyance to me

U-link made it difficult to know what was expected of me in this module

The questionnaire consisted of 30 statements to which students give their level of agreement/disagreement. The list of questions that was been sent to the experts can be found in appendix 4 and the questionnaire in appendix 5.

6.4.4 Procedure

All the courses that were used in this study are supported by a course management system (WebCT). Students have face-to-face lectures and they can access module resources by using WebCT. This allows them to communicate with each other and with the module leader to ask any question they want in relation to the module. Students can also get all the information about the assignments, workshops and marking schemes for every module on WebCT. This study was conducted by tracking students‟ use of WebCT in three modules on different courses at a UK University. These three courses were chosen to examine the framework in three different subject areas but at the same time the three groups of students are using the same learning management system under the same conditions as it is the only place they can find the lectures and notes for the courses. Moreover they have to submit their assignments via the system. The three courses use the same online instructional strategies using the WebCT Learning Management System application and departmental procedures.

In lectures students were reminded that they can get the information about the module from WebCT. Traditional lectures were given weekly over two terms. A special communication tool is available on WebCT which is known as the discussion board. Students can use the discussion board to communicate with the module leader and with each other. Lecture notes, workshop sections and other information about the module were posted weekly on WebCT. The modules were assessed by either

87 coursework or examination or both. Students were required to submit their assignments via WebCT.

The information available on the tracking system was saved weekly. The students were only asked to respond to a questionnaire in one of their course labs or lectures. Further information was collected from the module leaders and the tracking system. The questionnaire was submitted to the students towards the end of the second semester before the exam period. The students were asked to give their names. Only questionnaires that have the student‟s name have been used. The reason for this was that the study aimed to match the students‟ attitude, achievement and use of WebCT. In addition, it also investigated the relationship between these variables and the students‟ perception of the independent variables in the study‟s framework.