The Future of Education

Learning Management Systems (LMS) have been presented as a useful tool for the teaching-learning process. The purpose of this research is to analyse students’ perceptions about the perceived usefulness of a commonly used virtual learning environment, i.e. Moodle, and to assess the existence of differences in these perceptions depending on students’ previous experience with this online learning environment. In order to achieve this aim, an online survey was completed by 100 students of 21 different nationalities of the 6-EC (European Credits) International Marketing course taught in English language at the Universitat de València. In this course, Moodle is used as a repository of the course relevant materials, as a platform to deliver course activities and to obtain feedback from the lecturer, as well as a forum enabling interactions among lecturer and students. Students’ perceived usefulness of the Moodle platform is measured in the survey through a 8-item scale adapted from Olmos-Migueláñez et al. (2014). Students were also asked about their previous experience with Moodle or with other virtual learning environments, as well as their years of experience with such LMS. From the results obtained, first, it is observed that the perceptions about Moodle that show the highest scores are “It is motivating to receive feedback from the teacher about the learning process”, followed by “It facilitates learning”, “it constitutes an environment that favours the knowledge building process”, “It increases my involvement with content learning” and “It is important for my future professional practice because it allows for continuous learning”. Second, the ANOVA analyses conducted to compare students’ perceptions between students already familiar with Moodle and those that had used this platform in the present course for the first time allow to conclude that there are only significantly higher perceptions for experienced Moodle users regarding the items “It constitutes an environment that favours the knowledge building process” and “It facilitates learning”. Thus, the positive contribution of Moodle to the teaching-learning process seems to be visible for students in a short period of time after starting to use this environment. Explanations for these results, implications for lecturers using Moodle or other LMS, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Keywords: Moodle, perceived usefulness, higher education;