Nicole Racette

Distance Students' Readiness for and Interest in Collaboration and Social Media.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe how researchers from four large Canadian distance education or dual mode institutions conducted a survey aiming to describe the use of and interest in social software and Web 2.0 applications by distance education students and to measure their interest in collaborating with peers.Design/methodology/approach – In order to do this, an online questionnaire was distributed to students from four large Canadian distance education institutions. A systematic sampling procedure led to 3,462 completed questionnaires. The results show that students have diverse views and experiences, but they also show strong and significant age and gender differences in a variety of measures, as well as an important institution effect for interest in collaboration.Findings – Males and younger students score higher on almost all indicators, including cooperative preferences. In this paper the authors review quantitative results from the survey from earlier work (Poellhuber et al.) a...