The convergence of Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) has forced many parties to harness the power of the Internet. The discipline of education has witnessed the biggest impact of this breakthrough. The advancement of information technology is already transforming the education industry in a large scale worldwide. Higher learning institutions, such as colleges and universities, are redefining the whole world as their marketplace. The term E-learning has brought a new meaning to education. It has been touted as the next wave in the evolution of learning. E-learning transcends typical time and space barriers, allowing students to access learning opportunities day and night from any part of the world. In higher institutions, E-learning is making it possible for non-traditional students, those with families, full-time jobs and all other kinds of responsibilities, to be a part of the knowledge economy. Technology developments have raised hopes for millions to participate in the “paper-less” society.

It is widely acknowledged that nontraditional students, i.e. working adults returning to schools or students who are unable to attend classes on campus for other reasons, make up a rapidly growing population in education today. In order to keep students motivated, it is essential that we know their reasons for choosing a particular mode of learning, in this case E-learning. Why would an adult person like to pursue an advanced degree through E-learning mode? What are the motivating factors in pursuing an advanced degree in E-learning mode? Is it because of its low cost, instant scalability, geographical independence, or something else? This paper attempts to answer these questions based on the survey results obtained through a questionnaire from 71 students of the university in masters’ level courses in management and IT (MBA, MITM, and MIMT). It may be noted that this is an exploratory study with just a few cases in one institution, and the data are not intended to be representative of any specific population.

Characteristics of E-learners

Much of the research done on successful E-learners suggests that students who are attracted to E-learning share certain characteristics, including that they are voluntary seeking further education, are highly motivated, have high expectations, are more self-disciplined, are independent, are active learners, possess good organizational and time management skills, and can adapt to new learning environments. They tend to be older than the average student do and have a more serious attitude towards their courses, education and learning.  They are working and need more flexible schedules. They are not necessarily looking for campus-based educational and social opportunities.  Consequently, they bring with them a different set of assets and expectations to the learning process (Lyman, 1999; Palloff & Pratt, 2001; Willis, 1993).

According to Nebraska Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy (“Assumptions about,” 2002, Introductory para), adult learners possess several characteristics.  Adult learners are diverse, bringing a wealth of life experiences to the learning situation. They (a) vary widely among ages, abilities, job experiences, cultural backgrounds, and personal goals; (b) range in educational backgrounds from no formal schooling through many years of schooling; (c) carry well-developed personal identities; and (d) carry reservoirs of personal experiences, which are learning resources.

Adult learners want to be able to relate content to specific contexts in their lives. These contexts are often in the form of a problem, issue, or concern in their worksite. These learners (a) tend to be pragmatic; (b) study to improve their performance in other social roles; (c) let their schoolwork take a back seat to other responsibilities, such as jobs and families; (d) expect their class time to be well spent; and (e) hope their courses will help them solve problems in their daily lives.

Adult learners prefer to have some degree of control over their learning. They may evidence a greater or lesser degree of self-directedness depending upon their maturity level and familiarity with the content. They (a) tend to be voluntary learners; (b) believe the decision to return to school is an important one; and (c) believe that education will be helpful.

The adults’ sense of self has a significant influence on the meaning of the learning situation for that person. Learners have differing degrees of self-efficacy and awareness of their own learning styles. They may (a) feel embarrassed about returning to school; (b) feel embarrassed to join classes with younger students; (c) hold negative impressions of their own abilities; and (d) hold negative impressions of schools and teachers.

In general, E-learning has been applied to and seen as most successful in the arena of adult and continuing education.  However, more universities are using this delivery method with all groups of students regardless of age or level of educational experience.

Internet-based learning, if it is based on interactive approaches to learning in which students are treated as co-discoverers of knowledge and asked to work in teams, has the potential to capitalize on adult learners’ prior knowledge and experiences in a way that traditional approaches have often failed to do.

The fact that most E-learners are adult learners is beyond question and this characteristic has been witnessed in many virtual universities. Belt (2001, para.3) compares the students population of Capella University and the University of Phoenix Online and concludes that although Capella University does not have an age requirement, most of its student population is 35-to-60 year-old mid-career professionals. At the University of Phoenix Online, there is even a requirement for admission whereby a potential student must be 23 years old and employed with a full-time job.  Although the University of Phoenix has a traditional brick and mortar campus, students enrolled in the University of Phoenix Online do not study at the traditional campus – their education is offered completely on-line. As a result, when many students graduate from these schools, they are not looking for jobs because they already have them.

Learning Styles and E-learning

There has been much research and rhetoric about the different learning styles people have. Instructors are encouraged to design activities and materials to accommodate all types of learning styles. Knowing which learning style you have can be helpful in taking advantage of your natural tendencies while trying to develop other ways of learning.

Learning styles (Learning Styles and Approaches, 2002, para.1 and 2) are commonly divided into three main categories: visual (you learn best by reading or observing), auditory (you learn best by hearing or listening), and kinesthetic (you learn best by doing).

It has been theorized that people tend to learn predominantly through one of their senses, i.e. auditory, visual or tactile. Auditory learners tend to retain what they hear, visual learners tend to retain more of what they see and read, and tactile learners tend to retain more when they are using their sense of touch. Learning styles may be described as sets of conditions under which learners prefer to work. For example, some learners may prefer (and learn more easily) when information is presented via print rather than orally, or vice versa. Creating an E-learning course that is varied in its approaches can help to motivate all students and keep them involved.  For example, in addition to asking students to read and engage in discussion online, if instructors use simulations, case studies, Internet research and collaborative group experiences, they can help broaden the learning experience and accommodate various learning styles.

Litzinger & Osif (1993) define learning styles as the ways in which children and adults think and learn. They break down thinking and learning processes into cognition - the ways in which people acquire knowledge; conceptualization – the ways in which people process information; and motivation - which includes decision-making styles, values and emotional preferences.

Some students feel that online classroom more closely supports their learning style than the face-to-face classroom, particularly if they need time to think and reflect before responding to questions and ideas (Palloff & Pratt, 2001; Hartman, 1995; Lyman, 1999). Some may find that they express themselves more effectively in writing than verbally. For them, the online environment may be more appropriate because it is text-based.

Several attributes make a student successful online when he may not succeed in the face-to-face classroom. The successful online students tend to enjoy learning for learning sake. They become energized by the ability to be set free to explore a topic with peers. They demonstrate good thinking skills, an ability to work and do some amount of research independently, and an ability to work in an unstructured environment.

E-learning can successfully draw out a student who would not be considered an active and participative learner in the traditional classroom. It can provide an educational experience that helps to motivate students who appear unmotivated in another setting, because they are quieter than their peers and less likely to enter into a discussion in the classroom.

The online classroom can provide an alternative that may be quite useful for some students. However, all students must not force into online classroom because it is not effective for all. Understanding different learning styles can help illustrate why that is the case.

Understanding Motivating Factors

Motivating factors to take an advanced degree

Large numbers of adults seek educational experiences. While they do so for a variety of reasons, certain motivational factors stand out.  Reasons why adults pursue an advanced degree have remained fairly consistent over recent decades. The top two reasons are (a) to gain work-related knowledge and skills and (b) to gain personal development and fulfillment. Adult students are often under pressure to get a degree due to external expectations, i.e. to fulfill expectations or recommendations of their employer, for personal advancement in order to achieve higher status in their job, or to secure professional advancement and stay abreast with their competitors. A growing number of positions require high skills and the prospects become dimmer for people who have not acquired a degree if they are aiming for responsible positions (Lyman, 1999; Teichler, 1996). Some students may pursue an advanced degree due to their desire for lifelong education (Helmfrid, 1996). We are entering an era when lifelong education is a necessity for keeping up with developments within one’s own profession. In earlier times, one could acquire the competence for lifelong professional work; now there is a growing gap between the knowledge of any individual and the frontiers of knowledge. The need for lifelong education is not just for professional reasons but also to enrich a long life in retirement. Therefore, practically everybody is going to undertake some higher education provided that there are the right incentives and that suitable programs of study are offered.

Adult students may pursue an advanced degree out of the desire to acquire a special skill to help them adapt in a rapidly changing global environment. One of the chief characteristic of higher education is that it gives its recipients a capacity to adapt to change. It will continue to be one of the few advantages parents can give to their children in a rapidly changing world, and more and more people will become aware of that (Trow, 1996).

Motivating Factors to Take an Advanced Degree in E-Learning Mode

E-learning has many motivating features that attract adults to pursue an advance degree on-line instead of a traditional classroom. These motivating factors include efficiency, low-cost, timeliness and dependability, and flexibility.  E-learning also has the ability to reach an unlimited number of people virtually simultaneously, to help develop work-related  knowledge and skills, increase communication, build a community that can be a tremendous motivator for group learning, suit the rapid changing nature of knowledge, fulfill the need for geographic independence.  E-learning also can be more exciting, fun, and entertaining than self-directed learning (McCormac & Jones, 1998; Rosenberg, 2001; Collis & Meeuwsen,1999).

Adult learners are often so highly motivated that they may be characterised as self-directed learners, clear in the educational goals and objectives they wish to pursue. Internet-based learning has tremendous potential for saving time and money as well as alleviating related problems of transportation, childcare and lack of family support, which impeded them from pursuing adult education in the past. Adult learners have increased motivation when they are given some freedom to select media and learning activities. Adults registering for an on-line course today experience long hours of work, family obligations and uninterruptible career path. In general, students want learning that is flexible, relevant to their work situation, current, personalized, portable, focussed, timely, affordable and valued (Fletcher, 1991; Hall, 1997; Haziah & Aziah, 1997).

Empirical Research on Motivating Factors in E-Learning

UNITAR is the first virtual university of Malaysia. It offers more than 10 academic programs in the fields of Business Administration, Information Technology and Humanities and Social Sciences from first to doctorate degree level. UNITAR is a virtual university where students and faculty members engage in learning and teaching activities through the mixed use of face-to-face, online and multimedia environments. UNITAR has adopted a blended model of delivering education. It comprises of on line meetings with the students as well as a limited face to face meetings with them. At UNITAR, students come for their FTF classes only about four times in a semester of about four-month duration. There are about four online classes for each course in a semester.

A comprehensive questionnaire on motivating factors in E-learning was designed to obtain the views of students pursuing advanced degrees from University Tun Abdul Razak (UNITAR). Approximately 300 students were registered in the January 2001 semester in a total of 3 master’s level courses (Master of Business Administration, Master of Information and Multimedia Technology & Master of Information Technology Management) at UNITAR. The questionnaires were sent through e-mail to all students whose e-mail IDs were made available by the academic affairs department. In all 159 questionnaires were e-mailed. Data were collected from 71 students giving a response rate of 44.65. A greater number of students in the MBA course responded to the questionnaire as they were reminded by the authors in one of the face-to-face classes with them. The response rate was lower from the students doing their MITM and MIMT courses as authors did not have the opportunity to meet these students in their face-to-face class. Thus, a major shortcoming of the research is that not all the programs are equally represented in the study.

A brief profile of the 71 respondents is given in the Table 1.

Table 1

Respondents’ Profile

Research Findings

The respondents were asked to rate on a five point scale (1 being strongly disagree and 5 being strongly agree) 20 items that were identified as possible factors motivating student to participate in E-learning, based on the literature review. A mean score, along with the standard deviation, of these 20 items arranged in descending order is given in the Table 2. A higher the mean score indicates higher agreement to that variable. The item “E-learning fulfils the need for increased flexibility” represented the highest motivating factor, followed by the item “E-learning fulfils the need for geographic independence.” “E-learning as a symbol of higher status” was the lowest motivating factor, and other low factors included cost and efficiency.

Once the mean score was obtained, the five top motivating factors were identified and used for further analysis to see the relationship of those factors with the age, gender, marital status, length of employment, and the program for which registered at UNITAR. A chi-square test was conducted, for example, to test the hypotheses if age and the variable with the top mean score (E-learning fulfils the need for increased flexibility) is related. In all the above cases, the Pearson Chi-Square gave asymptotic distribution value greater than 0.05, hence no significant relationship was found between the five variables having the top mean scores and age, gender, marital status, length of employment, and the program of study.

Table 2

Mean Score of Motivating Factors

Conclusion

People join E-learning courses for a variety of reasons. The empirical research done for this study reveals that the top five motivating factors in choosing an E-learning course are as follows: (a) It fulfils the need for increased flexibility; (b) It fulfils the need for geographical independence; (c) Web-based environment can potentially offer many opportunities for enriching the learning process – can have the world at your fingertips; (d) E-learning suits the rapidly changing nature of knowledge; and (e) E-learning offers temporal independence (learning can be done anytime convenient to the students).

The study may help the providers of online courses design their strategies and position their courses in line with the above. Learning at your own time, pace, and space seems to be the most appropriate positioning for such courses. It must be noted, however, that this is only an exploratory study based on a small sample of respondents from one university. Larger studies at other institutions should be conducted to help validate the findings.

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