Pranaket Kamble, Omkar Nalawade, Anurag Mishra, Suraj Talape, Dr. Prashant Chordiya

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24131671

Digital learning is now routine in Indian higher education, yet the evidence on whether rural and urban students benefit equally is mixed. We present DLEF, a measurement-and-decomposition framework with an open reference implementation. It compares rural and urban higher-education students in a single sample on performance impact, engagement, satisfaction, digital literacy, self-efficacy and infrastructure. DLEF scores six instrument dimensions, forms a standardised composite outcome index, tests group differences with Welch and Mann-Whitney tests, Hedges’ g, bootstrap intervals and Holm correction, splits the urban-rural gap into explained and unexplained parts with a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, and tests a literacy, self-efficacy, engagement pathway by bootstrap mediation. Fifteen automated tests check that the implementation recovers effects planted in synthetic data and reports none where none were planted. Data collection is planned for Pune district, Maharashtra. This manuscript reports no empirical results about students. The results section lists the outputs we will report once the collected data are analysed. We draw no conclusion about rural-urban differences here.

digital divide, digital learning effectiveness, digital literacy, rural-urban disparity, higher education, Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, educational technology

We specified DLEF, a framework for comparing digital learning effectiveness between rural and urban higher-education students on six dimensions in one sample, and gave a protocol, a mathematical formulation and a tested reference implementation. The framework combines established statistical methods and proposes the composite DLE index and a specific application of the Blinder-Oaxaca and mediation analyses to this question. The paper reports no empirical findings. Whether rural students experience lower digital learning effectiveness than urban students, and how much of any difference is associated with infrastructure, literacy and self-efficacy, remains for the data to say.

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Pranaket Kamble, Omkar Nalawade, Anurag Mishra, Suraj Talape, Dr. Prashant Chordiya (2026). A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Comparing Digital Learning Effectiveness Between Rural and Urban Higher Education Students. International Journal of Computer Techniques, 13(6), 710–720. ISSN: 2394-2231. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24131671