The opinion of university students on distance education using ICT

Introduction. Distance education within the university context has been spread worldwide for more than four decades and has been mainly developed in the last years thanks to the use of the information and communications technology (ICT). There are few studies investigating the opinion of university students on distance education using ICT tools compared with traditional learning (face to face). There are no studies on the best valued teaching techniques either nor why they are considered so. This lack of research justifies the present study. Methodology. A survey was conducted among university students of Psychology from the Open University of Madrid (Udima). 177 students took part in the study filling in a 15 item questionnaire through a Google Docs. Results. The students consider distance education using ICT to be better or as good as traditional (face to face) education; they also highly value this methodology as far as the improvement of their capabilities and academic achievement is concerned. Besides, the best valued didactic tools are those that seem to allow higher autonomy to the student and have less technological demands. Discussion. The results of this research are similar to those found in previous studies that analyzed other educational levels or populations. Paradoxically, synchronous or more innovative tools were not the best valued, probably because of the unique profile of the student within the distance education system