New Perspectives in Science Education

Recently appeared online courses rapidly gained their popularity due to the great opportunities. Absolutely different people can study any discipline for various purposes. Online courses can be useful both to children in preparing for lessons, and to adults in advanced training. Gradually, courses are becoming not only part of the additional curriculum at the university, but part of the mandatory program, too. However, not everyone supports the new way of education. Therefore, the goal of this work was to identify students' attitudes towards online education, the reasons for their preferences on online format of education and the willingness to replace traditional lectures into an online format. The study was carried out on the basis of a survey of more than 6,000 students as part of the Student Life Survey conducted every year at the HSE. The analysis was made by using various clustering methods, such as hierarchical clustering, clustering using the K-means method and analysis of latent classes, as well as analysis of variance. The students were divided into 6 clusters based on the different attitude towards the replacement of all lectures to the online format: devotees of HSE, amateurs of online courses, disciplined, social, learners for the grades, a mixed cluster.

Keywords: online education, hierarchical clustering, K-means, latent classes, analysis of variance.

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