Distance Delivery of Courses: What Components are Important to Students? (original) (raw)

2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings

On-line Delivery of Courses: What Components are Important to Students? Increasingly popular, on-line courses have seen enrollments double within a five year period to 3.94 million students in 2007. 1 Thus, it is important for educators to monitor courses to understand which course components enhance or detract from the on-line learning experience and to understand the delivery features and mechanisms that are important to students. Measurements of student perceptions about such factors and mechanisms provide indicators that can aid educators in the design of effective and high-quality on-line course experiences. In order to assess effectiveness of on-line educational offerings, numerous frameworks for analyzing the quality of on-line education exist, including the Quality Matters (QM) Program, the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education Cooperative (WCET) best practices, the E-Learning Maturity Model (eMM), and others. These frameworks identify factors important to the quality of on-line delivery. The frameworks possess similarities and repeated themes. Among the common themes are learning objectives, instructional resources and materials, learner engagement, and course technology. This study ties some of the quality factors present in the frameworks directly to student opinion. In order to better understand some factors identified in quality frameworks, faculty developed a survey to measure student perceptions related to factors of interest that directly affect students. Factors considered include learning objectives, resources and materials, and engagement and interaction. The survey was administered to 106 students enrolled in five distinct courses in three different formats (traditional lecture, online, and hybrid). The courses spanned subjects, with a research course, two consumer science courses, and two information technology courses. The survey did not address issues related to the course through which the respondent was accessing the survey, but rather, issues related to the student's experience with on-line learning in general. The selection of courses served to provide a cross-section of students by level and major with varying degrees of experience with online and hybrid modes of instruction. The survey was administered on-line and results were analyzed. This paper addresses the following issues.