A comparison of online communication in distance education and in conventional education

The online communication between students and teachers leads to both new problems and new opportunities. To investigate this, the authors made a comparison and evaluation of two versions of the same short course. The course "Planning and design of Web sites" is given at Chalmers University of Technology, Chalmers Lindholmen University College, both as a conventional course (ordinary lectures and workshops at location with online support) and a distance course (fully online). All students use the same Web site, which have functionality such as coursework, exercises, newsgroup, chat, etc. The evaluation shows that the time asynchrony was considered the most important advantage of computer mediated communications. The authors have also found that the distance course students were more satisfied with what they had learned and the Web site functionality. They thus concluded that the students in the fully online education adapted better to learning in the digital environment