چرا مردم از آموزش الکترونیکی متفاوتی بهره مند می شوند: اثرات فرایندهای روانی بر نتایج آموزش الکترونیکی

Using social cognitive theory, we opened up the black box of psychological processes in which e-learners engage. We believed that prior experience with ICT and virtual competence were two influential factors that affected e-learning and had a positive influence on its outcomes. We tested our hypotheses on a sample of 383 Chinese students participating in online courses. Our findings confirmed the effect of virtual competence and revealed a nuanced mechanism by which experiences with ICT affected e-learning outcomes. We discussed the implications of this in e-learning practice.

In the U.S., over 90% of all public institutions offered some form of e-learning courses in 2004 and 96.2% of them agreed that e-learning was critical to the long-term strategies of their institutions [26]. Nearly 3.2 million students in the U.S. were taking at least one online course during the Fall 2005 term [4]. However, past failures have shown that investments in e-learning do not necessarily lead to financial returns and training outcomes. Understanding learners’ psychological processes is crucial for institutions to provide effective e-learning programs [2]. In response to this, we examined e-learners’ prior ICT experience and virtual competence, theorizing that they were major factors in the psychological processes that were of special importance to e-learning. We argued that e-learners’ psychological processes operate on the set of cognitive structures represented by virtual competence [28] when engaging in e-learning activities. We believed that prior experiences with ICT-related activities influenced e-learning outcomes through this competence. People who have prior experiences with ICT-related activities have developed ways to accomplish new learning tasks, resulting in better learning outcomes. We designed a study to test these effects. Our goal was to contribute to the e-learning literature in two ways. We first identified and distinguished among types of individual experience with ICT as antecedents of e-learning outcomes. Secondly, we applied social cognitive theory (SCT) to explain the effects of different types of ICT experience on virtual competence and consequently on learning outcomes.

Our study made several important contributions to knowledge of e-learning. First, we used SCT to provide a solid theoretical foundation and deepen our understanding of the individual psychological factors that are uniquely important in e-learning. Second, we distinguished between three types of ICT experience (information seeking, communication, and socialization) and empirically tested their effect on e-learning outcomes. This results in a more comprehensive account of the effects of ICT experience. Third, we disentangled learners’ psychological processes by introducing virtual competence, considering the psychological processes that link prior experience to learning outcomes, and then empirically testing virtual competence as an antecedent of the outcomes. Our findings revealed that experience with information seeking and communication via ICT helped individuals developed virtual competence, which in turn allowed them to learn effectively and feel satisfied with their experience.