Students Readiness for E-Learning: An Assessment on Hacettepe University Department of Information Management - Challenges of Information Management Beyond the Cloud - page 137

Students Readiness for E-Learning: An Assessment
on Hacettepe University Department
of Information Management

Yurdagül Ünal 1 , Gülten Alır 2 , and İrem Soydal 1

1 Department of Information Management, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey
2 Department of Information Management, Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Ankara, Turkey
{yurdagul,soydal}@hacettepe.edu.tr, [e-mail]

Abstract. Students are one of the key elements during the implementation of e-
learning systems within universities. To be able to build solid and effective e-
learning systems, it is important to know the level of students' readiness. In this
paper, e-learning readiness of the Department of Information Management
(DIM) students at Hacettepe University will be investigated. A 39-item e-
learning readiness questionnaire (along with some descriptive questions, such
as gender and grade-level) that was tested in previous studies was used to obtain
the data. The results show that, although some improvements are needed, DIM
students are at the expected level of e-learning readiness, in general.

Keywords: E-learning readiness, higher education, students' readiness.

1 Introduction

The concept of e-learning has been discussed in recent years by many institutions and
researchers under the topics of “online learning”, “distance learning”, “distance
education”, “virtual learning”, etc. in Turkey [1], [2], [3]. Although in practice there
are some attempts in the universities to develop e-learning programs, the acceptance
or readiness of the faculty and students has not been investigated much. It is important
to understand the agents that affect the e-learning eco-system in order to create solid
e-learning environments.
This study is based on our previous research which revealed the readiness levels of
academic staff working at the Faculty of Letters of Hacettepe University [3]. This
time the aim is to investigate the readiness levels of the Department of Information
Management (DIM) students. Hacettepe University's DIM is one of the largest
departments in the Faculty of Letters, with its 311 undergraduate students. According
to the results of our former study, the academic staff of the DIM had the highest
scores among other departments in the Faculty, in terms of e-learning readiness.
E-learning is particularly important for information science programs of
universities, since the discipline evolves rapidly and this change affects the theoretical
curriculum as well as the practice [4].