Levels of interest among prospective and enrolled undergraduate students in learning through online and blended modes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In many developing countries, at least in Africa, many colleges and universities continue to deliver undergraduate level education in the in-person, face-to-face, mode. Many of these institutions are slow in adopting and embracing the online learning mode. This study investigated levels of interest among prospective and enrolled undergraduates for the full-online or blended learning mode. The study also assessed the factors that stimulated the interest of these groups for the preferred delivery mode. Based on a sample of 414 prospective and enrolled undergraduates from private and public colleges and universities in the context of Botswana, and using a survey design that involved questionnaires, and regression analysis, the study found that majority (56%, n=414) of the sample was interested in and preferred some form of online or blended learning, compared to the face-to-face learning mode. The proportion of individuals with keen interest in the blended learning mode, at undergraduate level, is surprisingly high. The motivational drivers for the student choice are linked to greater flexibility and convenience, and perceived better opportunity for interactions with professors and classmates (OR=10.9; 95% CI: 5.4 – 22.1). The COVID-19 outbreak and the requirements for social distancing may have also accounted for the level of interest reported. The findings have major significance for curriculum design and development, instructional design in higher education, education technology infrastructure development, and long-term enrolment planning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".