Sustainability in Lifelong Learning: Learners’ Perceptions from a Turkish Distance Language Education Context

Abstract

This descriptive study, which adopts a mixed-methods approach, investigates whether the language learning component of the distance education program at a vocational school of higher education contributes to the students’ lifelong learning propensities, 21st-century skills and sustainability of their language education. A questionnaire eliciting answers from four standpoints were administered to students receiving English language instruction in the program. As for the qualitative side of the study, group interviews were held with volunteers. The quantitative data were analyzed by a statistical program while the interview data were subjected to content analysis. The findings reveal that although the students have a positive attitude toward language learning in a distance education program, they frequently refer to the need for the presence of a teacher for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, it appears that the requirements of the language component of the program contributed to the students’ plans for sustainability of their education after graduation. The results further indicate a need for more interaction and collaboration to be incorporated in the activities and that the philosophy underpinning the program, curriculum and materials need to be reconsidered to equip the students to compete with the dynamics of the educational world.

Sustaining Students’ Identities within the Context of Participatory Culture. Designing, Implementing and Evaluating an Interactive Learning Activity

“…In recent decades, digital media has facilitated the emergence of new ways of creating, sharing and organizing knowledge, often unknown of and ignored by schools and the formal contexts of teaching and learning [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Many of these digital practices revolve around popular youth culture, and take the form of affiliations in online communities such as Facebook, expressions such as creating videos, multimodal and transmedial forms of writing, collaborative problem-solving to complete tasks-including certain collaborative video games-or developing new shared knowledge, such as Wikipedia, as well as the dissemination of content in a blog, etc.…”

Online Learning Tools in the Era of m-Learning: Utility and Attitudes in Accounting College Students

“…Other secondary results confirm that the students give a high score to the teacher's ability to solve problems [49], the teacher's role as motivator of m-learning process [45,56,57], and the teacher's role as online tools manager [51][52][53]57]. Likewise, the results confirm the importance of the teacher's role for the transactional presence, which occurs when the student perceives that there is someone on the other side of the mobile device during the learning process [54,55].…”

“…Most studies combined purposes about the social presence of the teacher in computerized scenarios, teacher's ability to manage the VLE, student's motivation, and the intellectual resolution of questions [45,54,55]. There are results that indicate that even students who have positive attitudes require a teacher for various reasons, some linked to the sustainability of m-learning due to the need for motivation [56,57].…”