A study of Chinese undergraduate students’ attitudes toward learning an online English course at a private university in Beijing

Abstract

The study investigated Chinese undergraduate students' attitudes towards online learning in an English course in affective, behavioral and cognitive aspects on the hypothesis that they would possess positive attitudes as well as impact of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Chinese cultural values on their positive attitudes. The subjects were Chinese students at a private university in Beijing selected through stratified random sampling, and 380 of them completed a questionnaire constructed based on the research framework, and 18 of them voluntarily participated in in-depth interviews to provide qualitative data. IBM SPSS Statistics 24 and NVivo 11 were used to analyze quantitative and qualitative data, respectively. The quantitative results revealed that the students had positive attitudes towards online learning in the English course at a high level. MOOC features and Chinese cultural values were found to influence their positive attitudes at a high level. The qualitative findings supported the hypotheses that the students preferred studying English on asynchronous and synchronous platforms, which provided them with their own learning space, non-face-to-face communication with the lecturer, and a cultural sense of face keeping, concurrently allowing them to learn online English actively. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, a supplemented finding, indicated an extraneous variable that influenced their positive attitudes. Replicated studies in different contexts were recommended for future research.