The Future of Education

The emergence of online courses in higher education offer flexible learning opportunities to the twenty-first-century learners (Gedera, Williams, & Wright, 2015). Flexible learning is based on the recognition of differences between students, which are addressed by providing varying degrees of choices to learners regarding what, where, when, why, and how to learn (Bergamin, Ziska, Werlen, & Siegenthaler, 2012). Studies indicated that flexibility is perceived as beneficial to online instruction (Gillingham & Molinari, 2015) and constitutes a key factor in students' enrollment to online courses (Jaggars, 2014).

The purpose of this study was to gain insights into how students utilize the flexibility components in a fully online academic course. The research questions were: (1) How do students utilize flexibility of time, place, and learning resources, in a fully online academic course? (2) What types of students can be identified, based on their learning time, place and learning resources usage?

The study examined 195 students, who participated in a fully online academic course in Humanities, in 2014/2015. The course consisted of diverse learning resources, including: video lectures, reading materials, discussion forums, assignments and an exam. The study was conducted using a data mining methodology, which was applied on a data set with over 86,000 records, that documented the students' actions during the course. A set of variables were computed for each student, describing their activity in the course, in regard to: time of study, place of study and learning resources usage. The variables were analyzed using statistics and cluster analyses.

The paper will present the findings which revealed differences between the students in regard to their learning time, place and learning resources usage. Several types of students were identified: (1) Three types were distinguished by their intensity of activity over the course weeks; (2) Four types were distinguished by their place of study, and their intensity of activity over the week days; (3) Four types were distinguished by their intensity of usage of the learning resources. In line with the literature, this provides further evidence regarding the ability of a fully online course, which incorporates flexibility components, to serve diverse students' needs.