E-Learning at Universidade Aberta: an empirical study applied to management courses

Over the last decades, we assisted to unprecedented changes in economic and social environment. People and organizations needed to learn in order to deal with changes, innovations and uncertainty, and almost of all them needed to adopt new ways to cope with unknown situations. Therefore, organizations need people with strong and up-to-date knowledge in strategic areas. This led to changes in the demand for higher education courses, in students’ characteristics and needs and in the nature of instruction provided to them. Traditionally, distance education in higher education offered solutions to students who could not be in a traditional classroom. However, the growing need for continuous learning and the unprecedented technological innovation in communications led to methodological changes in the traditional distance education. The change is deep. With the exception of a few studies, most of what have been written about distance education in the middle of the 1990s is out of date. The objective of this paper is to define and share the conception of a research about the population of Portuguese Open University students enrolled in curricular units of the Bachelor in Management. We focus on the transformation process centred on the students environment and their study behaviour and highlight the basic methodological issues with the coming new waves of students that will interact on a much more different context compared with that of the 1990s. Our intent is therefore to get a better understanding of the transformations of the online higher education in management studies and make progressive contribution to the comprehension of how learning and teaching have changed. There is already a vast literature on online management teaching experience but there is a need for empirical studies. Consequently, we are trying to see how theories and principles are describing correctly the practices of the teachers and students and how expectations and other variables can contribute to that better understanding of management studies as they were and as they are practiced. We are still far from a large-scale computer-mediated training for management teachers, but our teaching staff is undergoing a process of change and upgrading its online teaching skills