Students’ attitudes towards distance education: A comparative study between Sino-foreign cooperative universities and ordinary universities in China

Abstract

With the development of the Internet, distance education has also emerged, and more people nowadays pay attention to it. Now a lot of college students also study through distance education, so it is important to understand their attitudes towards online education. As a new type of university that has just developed in China, the Sino-foreign cooperative universities provide students with different academic experiences compared with ordinary universities. Therefore, it is also necessary to explore whether the attitude of Sino-foreign cooperative university students and ordinary university students towards distance education is different. This study examines how type of university that students study at affect their attitudes towards distance education. To achieve the goal, a 14-item questionnaire which was distributed among 80 ordinary university students and 76 Sino-foreign university students and stratified random sampling technique has been used in selecting the samples. The results suggest that (1) students engaged in this study had a generally positive attitude towards distance education; and (2) there were no significant differences in students’ attitudes towards distance education due to whether they were studying in Sino-foreign university or ordinary university in China.