The four suggested online readiness questionnaires (as below) cover some common area which I have classified roughly as
- Computing readiness,
- Digital literacies,
- Study skills,
- Readiness for learning,
- Learning background and
- Learning Style.
The words in the image above are those used in the questionnaires and show the common themes. There is another version of this below with ‘capable’ and ‘comfortable’ removed as these are used repetitively in questions.
Penn State University: Online Readiness Assessment, San Diego Community College: Online Learning Readiness Assessment, Illinois Online Network: Self Evaluation for Potential Online Students, University of Houston: Test of Online Learning Success
Providing a questionnaire for students at the start of their learning experience is an opportunity to set expectations -asking ‘Do you have…?’ is another way of saying ‘we expect you to…’ for example. I would not expect that the results of these questionaires are used to adapt the learning activities or content presentation but to give advice to students.
I purposely did very badly in all the questionnaires and was pleased to see that I was offered some advice on my readiness or lack of it. In the case of the San Diego questionnaire there were helpful pointers as to how readiness could be improved whereas in the others the outcome was that just advice that I shouldn’t do an online course which was not particularly useful.
I would like to introduce something like this at our institution as a generic learning readiness questionnaire with lots of resources and advice for students to use to improve their readiness where necessary.
I am a learning technology advisor at the University of Strathclyde where i deal with day to day support issues for the use of our Moodle based VLE as well as advising more widely on online learning in general.