A Biographical Approach: Exploring students' experiences of e-learning
Helen Lyons, Louise Thorpe
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom
This session will present the findings from recent research into students' experiences of e-learning in a biographical context.The biographical approach explores the life history of the participant in order to provide a detailed description of a particular phenomenon or social setting. According to Roberts (2002), the appeal of biographical research is that it is exploring, in diverse methodological and interpretive ways, how individual accounts of life experience can be understood within the contemporary cultural and structural settings. Using a biographical approach, it is possible to explore social and cultural changes by investigating personal experiences before, during and after the introduction of that ‘cultural shift’. Biographical research therefore seemed perfect to explore the cultural shift from traditional education using paper, pencil, text book and face-to-face teaching, to an educational system that exploits new and emerging technologies to diversify methods of delivery and communication between tutor and pupil.Using an adapted version of the diary-interview approach (Lyons and Thorpe, 2008), this study aimed to explore students' experiences of e-learning in the context of their holistic learning experience. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 48 and as such had diverse educational backgrounds. Participants were asked to keep a diary for a period of two weeks. Daily entries were to include a log of daily learning activities, reflections on those activities and a response to a daily question sent by SMS text message. They then attended an interview where themes emerging from the diaries were explored in more depth.This approach enabled us to gather rich stories from the participants and provided an opportunity to explore when, how and why e-learning was introduced to them. In some cases, it was possible for participants to compare their current experiences to previous experiences before technology was a ubiquitous feature of learning. This session will present the biographical stories of our participants and in so doing explore the cultural shift that e-learning has provoked in education.We will share with attendees the question sets used in this research and provide guidance on how a biographical approach might be used in their own research projects.Roberts, B. 2002. Biographical Research. Buckingham: Open University Press.Lyons, H. & Thorpe, L. (2008). 'The Diary-Interview Approach: Exploring student experiences of e-learning'. In: Improving Student Learning - Through the Curriculum, Durham, UK, September 2008. [In press]