Frequency Tables

The age distribution of students as shown in Figure 6.2 below is explained in detail in the CART analysis (section 6.5) by taking both MSc and BSc students into account separately. In general, 70% of students fall into age category of 21-40 years and another 26% are in the age range of 41-50 years.

Figure 6.2 What is your age?

Figure 6.3 below shows the gender distribution of students in the survey. The main reason for the imbalance of gender is the nature of disciplines and the number of responses received from each discipline. The responses from male dominant disciplines like engineering and IT were 6 and 11 respectively out of total 72 whereas responses from female dominant library and RM disciplines made up the remaining balance of 55. The composition of 34.7% males and 65.3% females in the study however was exactly matched as per the HE Statistics Agency data for 2011 (HESA, 2011). There are 212880 females (65.4%) as opposed to 112575 (34.6%) males in PT studies in the UK.

Figure 6.3 What is your gender?

Figure 6.4 below shows the details of students’ background educational qualifications. As explained in the CART analysis and Spearman correlations sections below too, this is inter-connected with the employment and the discipline of study. The MSc Engineering programme requires a Bachelors engineering degree as a pre- qualification, although students can apply for the programme without a degree. The MA/MSc ILM and MSc RM programmes do not specify the subject of the Bachelors degree that acts as a pre-qualification, but it is generally assumed that it will not be similar to the Masters subject area. MSc IT students mostly enroll on the programme without a relevant first degree. The 13.9% of non relevant degree holders are the students who need a

career change in the library or RM fields and this is supported from the interview data. The 6.9% of students who have other professional qualifications must have directly benefitted from the APL scheme. Some students in the BSc (Hons) Librarianship programme also had foundation degrees although it was not an entry criterion and they mainly fulfilled the ACLIP professional qualification together with work experience in a library. The majority

of 40.3% of Masters Students who did not have relevant Bachelors’ degrees represent a

typical category of WBL. ILM is a conversion Masters so most students have un-related first degrees.

Figure 6.4 What is your highest educational qualification?

Figure 6.5 below shows the distribution of employment amongst WBL students. By analyzing the list, it is observed that WBL has paved way to access to HE for many professional, and semi professional employees.

Figure 6.5 What is your main employment?

Figure 6.6 below shows the number of hours students spend on their main

employment. This fact was explained as to how students’ gender affects to working hours

in the CART analysis in section 6.5. However, the key importance of this fact is to find out whether WBL students get enough time for their studies whilst being employed, whether this is the main reason for student dropouts or low performance, and whether employers are concerned about this fact. This was further elaborated at the interviews which revealed that sponsored students gained more benefits than non-sponsored students in terms of free study hours and study leave being granted from their employers.

Figure 6.6 On average, how many hours a week do you spend on your main employment?

In general, the usual maximum working hours of 48 hours for a week in the UK (NIDIRECT, 2013) is the dominant figure in the sample where 63.9% of students work between 31-50 hours and a further 2.8% above 50 hours. Only 33.3% of students work for 0-30 hours.

As shown in Figure 6.7 below, only 20.8% of students are fully sponsored and another 11.1% are partly sponsored by employers. The significant portion of 51.4% self finance their WBL and this implies that their workplace earnings are sufficient to allow students to pay their own fees. This reflects another important fact that future university HE programmes could be more work-based as this gives students a better financial advantage during the global economic crisis.

Figure 6.7 Who is sponsoring your studies?

Although the students’ place of residence as shown in Figure 6.8 does not seem to have any relevance to online distance WBL, this fact cannot be simply ignored in some WBL programmes. It was revealed during interviews that those students who live in the North East of England (23.6%) tend to visit the University more often in order to meet with academic staff, thereby using their close proximity to their advantage. Students who lived further afield, but still within the UK (48.6%) attended study schools as they appreciated the benefits of face to face meetings. From interview data, it was clear that those who were unable to attend study schools due to work commitments or distance regretted for not being able to do so. These facts lead us to think that the physical community feeling is a significant factor in WBL. However, students from outside the North East (76.4%) who would not visit the university nor meet academics in person could still perform well in the programmes using the distance support.

Figure 6.8 Where do you usually live?

Access was found as one of the key deciding factors in WBL for all the stakeholders. The revolutionary rapid growth of ICT today has made access much easier. Student access of online programmes from university servers through the internet is round the clock and can support the globally dispersed nature of students. Figure 6.9 shows the

students’ locations of access of programmes which spreads from home to workplace to

libraries but the dominant access location is home where most of the individual WBL takes place.

Figure 6.9 From where do you access your online programmes/s?

The main demographic characteristics have been analysed on a frequency basis. The other sections of the questionnaire responses are analysed with three different analysis techniques as described below.