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Impact of student choice of content adoption delay on course outcomes

Published: 13 March 2017 Publication History

Abstract

It is difficult for a student to succeed in a course without access to course materials and assignments; and yet, some students delay up to a month in obtaining access to these essential materials. Students delay buying material required for their course due to multiple reasons. Out of a concern for students with limited financial resources, some publishers offer a period of free courtesy access. But this may lead to students having access later in the course but then having a lapsed period until they pay for the materials after the courtesy access period ends. Not having key course materials early on probably hurts learning, but how much? In this paper, we investigate the question, "Does lack of access to instructional material impact student performance in blended learning courses?" Specifically, we analyze students who purchased and obtained access to online content at different points in the course. We determine that both types of failure to obtain access to course materials (delaying in signing up for the product, or signing up for a free trial and letting the trial period lapse without purchasing the materials) are associated with substantially worse student outcomes. Students who purchased the product within the first few days of class had the best scores (median 77). Those who waited two weeks before accessing the product did the worst (median 56, effect size Cliff's Delta=0.31 1). We conclude with a discussion of possible interventions and actions that can be taken to ameliorate the situation.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Should Learning Analytics Models Include Sensitive Attributes? Explaining the WhyIEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies10.1109/TLT.2022.322647416:4(560-572)Online publication date: Aug-2023
  • (2023)A Trusted Learning Analytics Dashboard for Displaying OERDistributed Learning Ecosystems10.1007/978-3-658-38703-7_15(279-303)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2023
  • (2022)Connecting the dots – A literature review on learning analytics indicators from a learning design perspectiveJournal of Computer Assisted Learning10.1111/jcal.1271640:6(2432-2470)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2022
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  1. Impact of student choice of content adoption delay on course outcomes

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      LAK '17: Proceedings of the Seventh International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference
      March 2017
      631 pages
      ISBN:9781450348706
      DOI:10.1145/3027385
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 13 March 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. content adoption delay
      2. effect size
      3. performance
      4. procrastination

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      LAK '17
      LAK '17: 7th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference
      March 13 - 17, 2017
      British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

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      LAK '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 114 submissions, 32%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 236 of 782 submissions, 30%

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      View all
      • (2023)Should Learning Analytics Models Include Sensitive Attributes? Explaining the WhyIEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies10.1109/TLT.2022.322647416:4(560-572)Online publication date: Aug-2023
      • (2023)A Trusted Learning Analytics Dashboard for Displaying OERDistributed Learning Ecosystems10.1007/978-3-658-38703-7_15(279-303)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2023
      • (2022)Connecting the dots – A literature review on learning analytics indicators from a learning design perspectiveJournal of Computer Assisted Learning10.1111/jcal.1271640:6(2432-2470)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2022
      • (2019)Goal-based Course RecommendationProceedings of the 9th International Conference on Learning Analytics & Knowledge10.1145/3303772.3303814(36-45)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2019
      • (2019)An Architectural Perspective of Learning AnalyticsMachine Learning Paradigms10.1007/978-3-030-13743-4_7(115-130)Online publication date: 17-Mar-2019

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