Managed Learning Environments and an Attendance Crisis?

Ruth Barrett, Austen Rainer and Olenka Marczyk
Computer Science Department, University of Hertfordshire, UK

Students who have the benefit of a Managed Learning Environment (MLE) are very appreciative of the facility to access lecture notes, practical and tutorial exercises and other learning resources. This access allows students to work independently and, in many students eyes, obviates the need to attend all timetabled sessions. Should the lecturers be worried about this? Blended learning, with its mixture of online and face-to-face activities, allows for students’ different learning styles and for balancing external commitments. We report from a University in which the MLE, StudyNet, is extensively used on the majority of degree programmes and is regularly praised by the students. In this digital age the expectation of students is that all resources should be available electronically. However, a short survey identified a general unease among academics that these facilities adversely affect attendance and consequently student performance. Our broader study, at a mid-point in an academic year, investi gated relationships between attendance, performance in assessed coursework and students’ preferred ways of working. We found that students rated the contact time very strongly but placed most emphasis on carrying out work for themselves. There was a mismatch between many students’ perceptions of their use of the contact hours and the evidence from attendance records. We concluded that any student absence cannot be attributed to the availability of learning resources on an MLE. Other factors, such as the timetabling of contact hours, personal commitments and the need to earn were more relevant. The course in this investigation was an introductory programming course with 222 students, some of whom could carry out the programming exercises in their own time. At the mid-point in the academic year, we did not find a correlation between attendance and attainment.

Keywords: Blended learning, attendance, Managed Learning Environment

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