Men and Women Go Online with Different Attitudes?

Posted on July 9, 2007 by David Gray

Constantly alert to any new report that might additionally inform me about online students’ needs, requirements, and success factors, I happened this week upon this site called The Journal of Educational Technology & Society. If you select the “Current Issue” offering in the sidebar at this site, it will take you to a list of contemporary articles you can access either in an abstract or in full. There I found a very interesting study recently completed in Ankara, Turkey, by Erman Yukselturk and Safure Bulut. The title is “Predictors for Student Success in an Online Course.” I would provide a direct link here to the full report but, technically speaking, it infringes on the authors’ copyright. You can, of course, get to the full study just as I did, and for anyone thinking about an online course of study, I recommend it.

Among other things, their findings support the conclusion that many factors long thought to have predictive value in determining student success online… like age, gender, previous educational study and others… are not very reliable. My reading of this, in fact, leaves me to sustain the view I’ve had for a long time: the qualities that make a student successful in a traditional classroom are the same qualities that will bring success online.

With apologies for that long introduction above, there were three sentences in the report I wanted to share with you to see if you agree. In a section about how various types of students approach the online world, Yukselturk and Balut write:

Males communicate via this medium in a competitive manner and also try to improve their own status in relation to their peers. However, females view Internet-based communication as a medium to develop higher collaboration in online learning. They are more supportive of networks to increase learning and communication for the group.

If you are or have been an online student, based on your experience, are the statements above true, and if so, what have been the implications to you and your peers, if any, based on this suggested difference in online attitudes between men and women? If you have taught online, have you observed such differences in your online students? Is the situation in online courses materially different from their face-to-face counterparts?

[Photo source and credit here.]