Relationship between Online Learning Readiness and Structure and Interaction of Online Learning Students.

AbstractCurrent study tried to determine whether a relationship exists between readiness levels of the online learning students for online learning and the perceived structure and interaction in online learning environments. In the study, cross sectional survey model was used. The study was conducted with 320 voluntary students studying online learning post-graduate programs in Sakarya University. The participants were administered a question- naire consisting of readiness for online learning, perceived structure and interaction in the study. The hypoth- eses of the research were tested with structural equation modeling. It was found at the end of the research that online learning students' readiness for online learning was positively related with their interactions in learning environments and negatively related with perceived structure. In addition, there appeared to be a negative rela- tionship between perceived structure and interaction. In the study, it was found that readiness for online learn- ing was important regarding the structure that affects learning results of students and interaction variables.Key WordsOnline Learning, Readiness, Structure, Interaction.Internet provides the opportunity to access intercultural and personalized knowledge for learning, to acquire theoretic knowledge and to explore and apply knowledge (Holmes & Gardner, 2006). Internet offers worldwide accessible knowledge (Broadbent, 2002) and learning applications (Aggarwal & Bento, 2000) in any time and place. One of the learning applications which has become widespread with the opportunities provided by internet is online learning.Online learning can be defined as gaining knowledge and skills through synchronous and asynchronous learning applications which are written, communicated, active, supported and managed with the use of internet technology (Morrison, 2003). Online learning has become one of the most benefited applications in higher education. More than 30% of the students in higher education in United States of America participate in online learning activities (Allen & Seaman, 2011).To be able to have more effective and efficient results in online learning; a field which is increasingly becoming widespread; it is required to find learning theories addressing learning from educational and technical aspects. Equality, community of inquiry and transactional distance (TD) can be mentioned among the field-specific theories to be used in online learning. TD theory which can be used in both learning and teaching design stands out among these theories (Cicciarelli, 2008; Garrison, 2000; Saba, 2003).TD is "the psychological and communicative space which leads to potential misunderstandings between student and teacher behaviors; in other words it is not only a physical distance" (Moore & Kearsley, 2012). Concept of "distance" in the theory was re- lated with two components, namely structure and dialogue. Constituent of structure means that the courses in distance learning programs include ele- ments which are able to meet the individual differ- ence and student needs and they are easily accessible (Saba & Shearer, 1994). Dialogue can be defined as thinking of the conflicting aspects of the content (Gorsky & Caspi, 2005a) and communication and interaction with other students and teachers (Gorsky & Caspi, 2005b). Moore (1989) started to address the dimension of dialogue as interaction in time and defined three interactions, namely, student-teacher, student-student and student-content interactions.In a distance learning program, increase in dialogue leads to decrease in structure whereas increase in structure leads to decrease in dialogue (Chen, 2001; Moore, 1991). In studies examining this hypothesis of the theory, a negative relationship was found be- tween structure and dialogue (Chen, 1997; Chen & Willits, 1998; Jung, Choi, Lim, & Leem, 2002; Hop- per, 2000; Horzum, 2007, 2011). …