The Learners’ Needs

The consortium conducted a questionnaire to find out the learners' needs for an appropriate eLearning platform. In order to achieve that, teachers and trainers of the involved institutions, experienced in e/blended Learning courses were asked for their needs, proposals and necessary features for a LMS.

Methodology

During October and November 2014, an on-line questionnaire on the learners’ needs was distributed from the consortium partners to students of previous or current e-learning courses. Since 14/10/2014, 1004 persons responded. Not all the learners replied to all the questions given. The learners that replied were from Greece (571), Spain (211), Italy (152), Austria (34), Finland (24), FYROM (4), Romania (4), Turkey (3) and Albania (1). All the replies were combined and the results are following.

Basic Questions

The learners of the above mentioned courses were asked 16 questions:

1. How important do you consider having clear instructions about how to get started and how to find various course components on the platform?
2. How important is the ease of use of the platform and support service (manuals, tutorials, help desk)?
3. How important is for the platform to cover both the face-to-face training activities and the virtual ones?
4. How important is to have a personalized entry page when logging-into the platform (i.e., showing my progress, which chapters I have to revise, etc.)?
5. Is it important that most learning activities are concentrated inside the platform instead of being distributed among many different tools available on the Internet?
6. How important are collaborative working tools within the platform?
7. How important are one-to-one private messaging tools between students and/or students and tutors within the platform?
8. How important is that the platform incorporates gamification elements and/or game mechanisms (rewards, scores, votes,...)?
9. How important is for the platform to be connected to external social media (facebook, linkedin, pinterest, youtube, google+, ...) ?
10. How important is that the platform can manage groups of learners with the possibility of differentiating resources and activities among separate groups?
11. How important is for the learner to be allowed to customize the platform to better suit his/her needs?
12. How important is to easily find materials and information on the platform?
13. How important is a genuinely interactive way of studying on the platform?
14. How important is for working methods and activities on the platform to be new to the learner, so to try new ways of studying?
15. How important is the level of interaction with teachers and tutors through the platform?
16. Are there any other issues about the platform in a blended course that you want to suggest?

In the questionnaire, 4 levels (following a Likert-Scale) were available: 1=Needless, 2= Less important, 3= Important, 4= Very important.

The complete summary including the interpretation of the answers and a list of findings is available in the PDF-document.