Determining higher education student attitudes towards engaging with online academic writing skills programs

Abstract

The Learning Centre at Curtin University has recently released its academic writing skills programs in an online format which in 2010 had attracted over 3000 hits from students. In order to determine the effectiveness of these online programs and to predict when students are likely to engage with them, a questionnaire containing quantitative and qualitative items was added at the end of these online programs. The Theory of Planned Behaviour was used as a framework in order to determine students' attitudes and planned use of such online academic writing skills programs. The collected data revealed that, while students felt anxious with starting such programs, the instructional design process employed in the development of these resources made them intuitive, interesting and useful to the vast majority of participants. Circumstances in which students are likely to engage with such online programs in the future were also identified.