E-Learning Performance and Students' Results. Case of a French Business School

E-learning experiments in higher education are becoming more recurrent. However, these experiments are seldom tangibly applied to an entire academic year group. Integrating e-learning into a pedagogical program implies performance analysis in terms of both students and teachers, but also from the institute's point of view. Due to the lack of Information Systems based research into e-learning performance modeling, the article propose an analysis mixing this research area with some findings in Education Sciences. The first part of this article presents an analysis of the main scientific publications on which we have built our research model. The second part presents the initial findings of our on-going research project at Montpellier Business School (France). A comparison between traditional teaching and face-to-face teaching was carried out using the student marks in five different courses of study. The results show that the teachers' predisposition to adopting these new teaching techniques is not directly related to an improvement in the students' results. In other words, the paper is consistent with the need to avoid any techno-centered approach to on-line education. In the same way, the article concludes that a measure of the e-learning performance must not be limited to the students' results alone. Indeed, the case studied puts forward that the legitimacy of an e-learning project can lie more in the satisfaction of being able to meet new strategic challenges through its development, than in simply improving an existing teaching tool.