First-year education students' time and space preferences: Accessing study materials online

First-year education students' time and space preferences: Accessing study materials online

Increasingly, institutions of higher education recognise the importance of education spaces in supporting student engagement and participation with learning. This focus on education spaces is seen to be all the more important with the changes to the conceptions of learning as well as with the move to blended modes of delivery. This paper reports findings from a study investigating teacher education students' time and place preferences for accessing study materials online. The research described in this paper was designed as part of ongoing research – in the initial phase of research first year students in the Bachelor of Education degree were invited to complete an online survey. Initial findings from the quantitative analysis of survey results suggest that student preferences are significant for planning teaching and learning in online or blended learning, and that these preferences are independent of rurality/urban student background experience. The findings indicated students learn 7 days a week in a quiet place at home mostly from 9am–4pm and 7pm–11pm with a preferred learning period of 2.5+ hours. The period when most students are studying (and therefore when it would be best to organise a synchronous event, such as a webinar) is starting at 8pm on Monday to Thursday, since this is when the greatest number of students are studying. Our future work will focus on preferred media and optimum duration of individual learning activities.