1. WEB USAGE AND LEARNING STYLES IN AN ACADEMIC COURSE Moshe Leiba Rafi Nachmias Knowledge Technology Lab Science and Technology Education Center School of Education Tel-Aviv University Israel

2. Introductory Biology courses contain massive amount of new concepts and information. Many students do poorly or drop out (Belzer, Miller, & Shoemake, 2003). The Problem Purpose To asses students’ usage of E-learning components in an academic course. To explore the relationship between learning styles and students’ web usage.

3. Web servers record and accumulate data about user activities. There is a large variance among students in viewing E-learning components, most students used only a small percentage of the available items, whilst few students viewed all of them (Nachmias & Shany, 2002; Nachmias & Segev, 2003). Web Usage

4. Learning styles are defined as “characteristic cognitive, affective, and psychological behaviors that serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment” (Keefe, 1979). One learning style is neither preferable nor inferior to another: these are simply different approaches, with different characteristic strengths and weaknesses (Felder & Brent, 2005). Learning Styles

5. Felder and Silverman (1988) categorized students into four dimensions which relate to different aspects of the learning process: Visual Verbal Sensory Intuitive Active Reflective Sequential Global Input Perception Processing Understanding

6. Method Quantitative methodology. Web Mining: process of extracting information concerning the usage behavior of the users - an objective and noninvasive research method (Pahl, 2004). Participants: 71 bio-medical engineering, undergraduate students 37 participants (52.1%) were men and 34 (47.9%) were women.

7. Data Collection Tools Log Files The fields of the log format are: Student’s ID, Content Item accessed, Time of Access, Posting a Message and Viewing a Message.

8. Index of Learning Styles (ILS) The ILS questionnaire (Felder & Solomon, 1994) consists of 44 ‘‘choose A or B’’ items with 11 items corresponding to each dimension. The score on a dimension would be an odd number between -11 and +11. Data Collection Tools

9. The Course An introductory biology course at Tel-Aviv University, Israel in the year 2005. The students were offered several E-learning components which they were not required to use: Presentations Simulations Video lectures Virtual laboratories E-journals and E-books (E- Resources) E-papers E-games Discussion groups

11. Results Web usage of E-learning components Frequency Distribution of Usage

12. Results Percentage of students Number of simulations Frequency Usage of Simulations (26)

13. Results Number of presentations Percentage of students Frequency Usage of Presentations (16)

14. Asynchronous discourse 60% of the students participated passively. Results Types of Activity in the Forums Forum activity Percentage of students

15. Students' learning style preferences The individual learning preferences of the students were Visual, Sensing, Active and Sequential. Results

16. Sensory Intuitive VisualVerbal ActiveReflective Sequential Global

17. Correlations between Web usage and learning styles Results

18. Conclusions Students preferred Power Point Presentations by far. Large Variability among students in using E-learning components (Peled & Rashty, 1999). The individual learning preferences of the students were Visual, Sensing, Active and Sequential (Felder & Brent, 2005).

19. Students with a Visual preference tended to use more multimedia items (Zywno, 2003). Students categorized as having a Sensing learning style were more active participants in the online forums and visited the course Web site more often. These findings are not surprising, and are consistent with the Felder Model construct (Felder & Silverman, 1988). Learning Styles explain less than 10% of the Variance. Conclusions

20. “I’m an Abstract-Sequential learner. Please conduct yourself accordingly!”

21. Thank You! Moshe Leiba moshelei@post.tau.ac.il Rafi Nachmias nachmias@post.tau.ac.il