Students Readiness for E-Learning: An Assessment on Hacettepe University Department of Information Management - Challenges of Information Management Beyond the Cloud - page 145

5 Conclusion

E-learning is one of the hot topics, especially for universities' agendas. For an
effective implementation of an e-learning programme some serious planning and
analysis need to be done. Assessing teachers' and students' readiness for e-learning is
one of the main factors during the planning and implementation of e-learning projects.
According to our previous study, teaching staff of DIM was the most ready
department within the 16 departments of the Faculty of Letters of Hacettepe
University [3]. In this study we tried to assess DIM students' e-learning readiness.
Based on the Aydın and Taşçı's [18] assessment interpretation (see Fig. 2) the
results showed that, although the students of DIM were not fully ready to adopt e-
learning, for the “use of technology”, “self confidence”, “acceptance” and “training”
related issues, they were slightly higher than the expected level of readiness. This can
be interpreted to mean that the students of DIM were ready but some improvements
need to be done. Developing training programs for the students in order to help them
to understand e-learning better, making its benefits more clear, offering better internet
infrastructures with more computer and mobile technology facilities can help students
increase their readiness levels. The only component below the expected level of
readiness was “availability of technology”. This means, before implementing any
kind of e-learning programs, students' technological facilities must be improved. This
is also interesting, because almost all students (96%) declare that they have personal
computers and more than half of them (66%) said that they have Internet-connected
smart phones. This makes us think that, students might not be satisfied with the
technological facilities that they assume the university has to offer them.
Gender, grade-level and smart-phone usage differences also had some effect on
some items related to e-learning-readiness. Although females seem more enthusiastic
about using e-mail, learning management and file management tools, these clues
about the opinion differences between the genders and their possible causes should be
analyzed more and examined with some in-depth research. On the other hand, results
also showed that opinions on the use of technology , acceptance and training -related
issues may vary according to the students' grade-levels. Fourth-year students seemed
especially more adapted to e-learning and its components. Moreover, the results
indicated that first, second and third-year students need to be trained more about e-
learning. Since DIM has a technology-based curriculum, it could be viewed as normal
for senior students to get used to technology and more readily adopt e-learning related
issues. Furthermore, the use of internet-connected smart phones also affected
students' perceptions regarding the availability and use of technology components.
They seem more open to mobile technologies and probably wished to stay connected
from anywhere/anytime, which is also important for competent e-learning activities.
Although the findings of this study may give some tips about the profile of the
students of a department with a technology based curriculum, more comprehensive
studies must be conducted and reported throughout Turkey in order to determine a
model for a course of action for transitioning to an e-learning system in the whole
country.