Student Preferences for Learning Resources on a Land-Based Postgraduate Online Degree Program

Creating engaging online resources is an important part of the rapidly changing discipline of e-tutoring. There is increasing use of a wide range of media for online training but only a limited number of studies assessing their effectiveness. This study involved an educator working collegiately with cohorts of online students studying a specialist land-based postgraduate degree program (n = 79). The opinions of these mature online students, on current and potential learning resources, informed two interventions that provided novel online resources to the course. Student opinion on these new resources was captured and subjected to thematic analysis. The results identify that these students' favored resources were online lectures, course notes, primary literature, and tutors' opinion pieces because they were perceived as accessible, easy to engage with, assignment-related and/or provided something akin to a 'university campus experience'. In contrast, podcasts and knowledge review quizzes were strongly disfavored by the majority of respondents. The implications of this study in relation to online teaching practice are discussed.