Impacts of Online Academic Help-Seeking Behaviors on Undergraduate Student Self-Learning

This research concerns how online academic help-seeking behaviors of undergraduate students affect their self-learning. A survey was conducted with 104 undergraduate students from a university in Hong Kong. Six respondents who misconceived that they had learned a topic or concept online adequately but found they actually did not in subsequent assessments were interviewed in order to understand their online learning experiences in depth. An analysis of the results reveals that the availability of abundance of learning resources and the ease of accessibility of those resources on the Internet is a two-edged sword. Students who considered their assignment tasks being mainly skill-based, e.g. engineering students, tend to be associated with a less disciplined use of the Internet in their study and are less likely to be able to achieve higher level learning goals. Potential remedies to the problem are suggested.