Emotional obstacles of e-learning

Juutinen, Sanna Emotional Obstacles of E-learning Jyvaskyla: University of Jyvaskyla, 2011, 97 p. (Jyvaskyla Studies in Computing ISSN 1456-5390 ; 145) ISBN 978-951-39-4583-1 (nid) ISBN 978-951-39-4584-8 (PDF) E-learning is becoming more and more important learning media in both educational institutions and in corporate world. As this learning and teaching style keeps expanding to new areas of learning, teaching and training, it sets the requirements of the students and teachers to whole new level what the traditional way of teaching has done. The teachers and learners are obligated to learn new skills to manage their way through e-learning courses. The old habits and skills are no longer adequate in this new world of learning. This causes several students to frustrate and give up or make the new way of learning as a negative in their own thinking. The development of new e-learning courses and systems should be done with the care of users and their experiences. This dissertation’s focus is in the emotions of the e-learning users. The overall goal is to find out the emotional obstacles that e-learning brings to the users in their e-learning experience. Previous research has often paid attention to the systems that e-learners are using in order to improve the efficiency and functionality of those systems. The human-computer interaction and emotions that arise to users from these systems are not been researched earlier and therefore the emotional aspect of e-learning requires more attention. To understand the emotional effect in e-learning, two separate data sets were analyzed in order to discover the emotional obstacles in e-learning process. The dissertation proposes a tentative model that shows the emotional aspects that e-learning has to the students. Finally this dissertation recommends some future research aspects on the area and mechanisms to improve the user experience of the e-learners in order to make their e-learning more fluent and enjoyable.