Behavioral Aspects of Adult Students in Digital Learning

The Digital Age presents challenges for working adults returning to school to further their studies. Through the blended learning mode, the students undergo limited face-to-face interactions and the rest is imparted via a learning management system or computer-based system. As the students are scattered all over Malaysia, usage of ICT is mandatory. Because of this mandate, many adult students have complained and requested for more traditional teaching rather than through e-learning. Catering to the students' wishes would defeat the purpose of having a computer-based education initiative, thus the purpose of this study was to assess the attitudes of adult students toward the use of ICT in their learning process. The scope of this study was limited to adult students registered in 19 distance learning programs offered by the Institute of Educational Development (InED) of Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM). Through stratified random sampling, 500 students were e-mailed requesting them to complete an online questionnaire. After two months of deploying the e-survey, the returned responses were 253 or 50.6%. The questionnaire consisted of two parts with the first part being allocated for demographic variables. The second part operationalized the four attitudes, which were usefulness, confidence, liking and anxiety. The output from the parametric analyses of the forty attitude statements resulted in mean scores that ranked the independent variables from lowest to highest. The lowest ranked was computer usefulness, followed by liking, confidence in using computers, and anxiety towards computer usage. Thus, the empirical evidences showed that adult students were not comfortable with using computers or interact with a computer-based learning system. Consequently, they would have difficulties in their pursuit of higher education. Therefore, it is recommended that InED administrators conduct special workshops to train new students on the use of the learning management system as well as ensuring that this training session is compulsory for all adult students before the semester begins.