Online Student Perceptions

Successful completion of online courses by community college students is an issue both at the national and local level. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore community college student perceptions of online learning within the theoretical construct of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model, which describes the manner in which the elements of social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence interact to create an educational experience. An online questionnaire, interviews, and artifact reviews were employed in the study. Interpretive analysis was utilized to identify themes and provide insights into student perceptions of satisfaction and success with online learning. The findings of the study revealed aspects of community college student perceptions about online courses, related these perceptions to the social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence components of the Community of Inquiry model, and provided examples of successful instructional design and course facilitation techniques utilized in the online courses. The study findings provided insights about student perceptions related to communication and interaction, isolation, preferred course activities, and the positive impact of prompt and helpful instructor feedback. Recommendations for practical applications by instructional designers and instructors are provided.

The purpose of this interpretative, qualitative study was to discover reasons students participating in asynchronous online undergraduate courses perceive faculty as disinterested, the significance of this perception, and how students respond to disinterested faculty.  Online education continues to evolve and change how students learn and how online undergraduate students perceive and respond to faculty members.  With these changes, understanding which elements influence and impact the success of online undergraduate students becomes more complex.  The distinctive social context of virtual learning environments often contributes to online students characterizing faculty as disengaged.  Online students often have limited opportunities to interact directly with faculty, introducing occasion for students to misconstrue faculty intent, which can lead to deteriorated student perception of faculty, institution, online learning, and higher education. Student satisfaction and perceived success is reduced.   

This study documented the perceived experiences of eight students 18 years of age or older who attended and completed at least three asynchronous online undergraduate courses at a U.S. higher education institution during the years 2016 or 2017, and who experienced instructor behavior that they characterized as disengaged. Semi-structured, one-on-one interviews between the researcher and student participants facilitated data collection for this study.  The major themes that emerged during analysis of the interview transcripts and field notes were lack of faculty concern, diminished or loss of respect for faculty/institution, lack of faculty competence, overburdened faculty, feelings of isolation, and diminished or loss of interest in higher education or online study.  The student participants discussed examples of how faculty actions, or inactions, cultivated negative feelings.  This study revealed some promising insight to faculty–student interaction from the student perspective.  As a result, improved dialogue between instructors and students can establish a basis to motivate students and improve their perceptions of online interaction with instructors.  Improvements can arise from scholarly discourse surrounding the exploration of what specific factors induce the subjectivity of undergraduate students’ perceptions of faculty-student interaction.  This study’s data and findings can support the efforts of administrators, course developers, and instructors to improve awareness, behavior, and training programs for faculty members who teach in online learning environments.

The purpose of this experimental study was to redesign a traditional undergraduate course by integrating MOOC content and flipped classroom practice and to see its effectiveness through students’ experience and perceptions. The course named “Internet and Distance Education” was taught in Winter Semester, 2013 at the Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China to 15 undergraduate students majoring in education. E-learner satisfaction surveys found that students were generally satisfied with many aspects of the redesigned course, including instructor response timeliness, instructor attitude toward the technology, e-learning course flexibility, technology quality, Internet quality, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived e-learner satisfaction, while learner perceived interaction with others was not so satisfactory. Based on the findings, several suggestions to improve the course design are offered.

Blackboard Collaborate (BC), a synchronous, multimodal platform, has been incorporated into Open University Australia (OUA) students' online learning experiences. This study sought to investigate the perspectives of 134 interdisciplinary OUA students via an online survey and follow-up interviews. Findings revealed students' positive perceptions about BC as an engaging, real-time medium for feedback exchange, knowledge sharing, and virtual community building. Despite appreciating lecturers' telepresence, some students preferred not to show faces or use voice chat and queried the expediency of the BC technology and the timing of lecturer feedback, however. This investigation highlighted the pedagogical implications of synchronous teaching in distance education.

With the ever-increasing availability of online -education opportunities, understanding the factors that influence online student satisfaction and success is vital to enable administrators to engage and retain this important stakeholder group. The purpose of this ex-post-facto, nonexperimental quantitative study was to investigate the impact of faculty professional development, faculty degree status, and faculty longevity upon online student satisfaction and success. A large, archived dataset from an online public state university was analyzed. Repeated measures Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis was used to explore changes in student satisfaction over time. Results showed that both training and degree were not significant predictors of student satisfaction. On the contrary, faculty longevity was found to be a predictor of student satisfaction. Recommendations for future research include incorporating qualitative analysis and expanding the study to diverse institutional typ...

Teaching presence has been shown to influence student satisfaction as well as perceptions of perceived learning. However, past research on teaching presence has not investigated how teaching presence differs across discourse communities. This study investigated student's perceptions of teaching presence across different discourse communities (i.e., different academic disciplines) in accelerated online courses.

In this research a survey was performed among the students of Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University (Sweden) and the students at the Department of Computer Science and Telecommunications (DCST) at National Research University of Electronic Technology (Russia). The research aimed at exploring the difference in acceptance rate of the e-learning platform as part of the education by the students in two different countries. Some of the findings were that the largest proportion of DCST students never previously used any e-learning software before coming to the university, while the students in both DSV and DCST prefer the traditional face-to-face communication with the teachers. It was also noted that there is a significant difference in the teachers’ proficiency in using the e-learning software as part of the educational program in University two departments, where the DCST had a much lower rate of support of online-based education compared to DSV.

The topic of study was communication technology preferences of online students and online instructors.  The generational cohorts of each group were all assessed to see if preferential differences existed due to age.  The research problem was that technical generational differences cause challenges with effective communication between faculty and students in the online academic environment.  Supported by a combination of the transactional distance and generational theory, the purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to identify and compare the communication modes that online students and online instructors prefer to use to communication with each other for academic purposes.  Data was collected through surveying and analyzed by means of ANCOVA.  There were 271 participants, whereas 81 were online instructors and 190 were online students.  ANCOVA found no significant difference between groups controlling for age F (1, 267) = .001, p = .972, where p > .05.  This outcomes of this study support previous research conducted by Chang et al. (2016) and Bailie (2017) that email is the preferred means of interacting in distance educations.  This study also supports Severt et al. (2013) and Skidmore et al. (2014) in that generation X and millennials prefer electronic technologies for collaborating.  It is recommended that practioners in distance education create standardized communication mode policies so that both online students and instructors know which technology to use so that a sense of connectedness is established to enhance academic success.  More research is needed as communication technology advances and newer generations reach college level age.

With the ever-increasing availability of online -education opportunities, understanding the factors that influence online student satisfaction and success is vital to enable administrators to engage and retain this important stakeholder group. The purpose of this ex-post-facto, nonexperimental quantitative study was to investigate the impact of faculty professional development, faculty degree status, and faculty longevity upon online student satisfaction and success. A large, archived dataset from an online public state university was analyzed. Repeated measures Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis was used to explore changes in student satisfaction over time. Results showed that both training and degree were not significant predictors of student satisfaction. On the contrary, faculty longevity was found to be a predictor of student satisfaction. Recommendations for future research include incorporating qualitative analysis and expanding the study to diverse institutional typ...

Blackboard Collaborate (BC), a synchronous, multimodal platform, has been incorporated into Open University Australia (OUA) students' online learning experiences. This study sought to investigate the perspectives of 134 interdisciplinary OUA students via an online survey and follow-up interviews. Findings revealed students' positive perceptions about BC as an engaging, real-time medium for feedback exchange, knowledge sharing, and virtual community building. Despite appreciating lecturers' telepresence, some students preferred not to show faces or use voice chat and queried the expediency of the BC technology and the timing of lecturer feedback, however. This investigation highlighted the pedagogical implications of synchronous teaching in distance education.