Title:	ICT USES AND EFFICIENCY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN ANALYSIS OF THE STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE DETERMINANTS IN ONLINE COURSES USING STRUCTURAL EQUATIONS
Author(s):	David Castillo , Jordi Vilaseca , Enric Serradell
ISBN:	978-972-8924-55-3
Editors:	Piet Kommers and Pedro Isaías
Year:	2008
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Efficiency in Higher Education, Students performance, E-learning, Structural Equations.
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	91
Last Page:	97
Language:	English
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Paper Abstract:	International literature shows empirical evidence of the fact that the discussion about whether to use or not use technology in higher education courses no longer concern because the real significant issue is in what manner technology is used at university, teachers and students’ level. It implicitly means that the positive effect on students performance from the adoption of innovations in the technology of teaching and learning do not affect all teaching methods and learning styles equally, as it depends on sets of explanatory variables of different nature, such as the university strategy and policy towards Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) adoption, students abilities, technology uses in the educational process by teachers and students, or the selection of a methodology that matches with digital uses. This paper will try to provide answers to these questions with data from ongoing training and data from an experimental set-up performed within the eLene-EE project1. The analysis is based on data collected from online students at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), where the main issue is to, conditional on a broad set of other potentially important explanatory variables; test the hypothesis that specific uses of ICT in higher education affect student performance and the efficiency of teaching and learning processes. An empirical model based on structural equations has been defined. This methodology, although it has rarely used in economic papers, has an important potential to explain complex relationships between variables. The results of our analysis show that motivation is the main variable affecting online students’ performance, confirming the importance of this parameter as a source of education’s efficiency. Motivation appears in our model as a latent variable receiving the influence of students’ perception of efficiency, which is, in turn, a driver for the indirect positive and significant effect on students’ performance from students’ ability in ICT uses.
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