Search

Course design influences online student performance and engagement. A total of 222 instructors and instructional designers responded to Martin et al.'s Online Course Design Elements instrument to examine the frequency of use of design elements. Among the five factors in the instrument, the interaction and communication subscale had the lowest mean score in comparison to overview, content presentation, assessment and evaluation, and learner support. Both groups rated instructor contact information, chunked content, and assessment alignment with objectives highly. Items that were rated lowly included learner self-assessments and collaborative student activities. Responses by the two groups differed significantly for three items: accommodations for students with disabilities, self-assessment options, and frequent student-student interaction. Results are discussed within the context of the literature. This study has implications for online instructors and instructional designers who design online courses, faculty developers who provide training for instructors, and administrators who build support structures for faculty and staff.

This study examined 256 faculty survey responses to determine perceptions of helpfulness of 24 time management strategies grouped into four categories defined by Berge (1995) as managerial, pedagogical, technical, and social. Findings indicate that establishing clear and specific expectations (M = 4.32) was perceived as the most helpful, followed by organizing content into modules or units (M = 4.28), which were both pedagogical time management strategies. Participants additionally responded to two open-ended items regarding the most and least helpful time management strategies. The open-ended responses were consistent with the survey findings. The relationship between faculty demographic factors and strategies showed that receiving training to teach online affected the faculty perceptions of technical time management strategies.

The purpose of this article is to report findings pertaining to faculty members' perception of the importance of engagement strategies utilized in the online learning environment and to compare them with student perception data that had been previously collected using the same instrument. A validated survey instrument, the online engagement strategies questionnaire, was used to collect data from online instructors who teach in higher education. Email distribution lists of two professional associations were utilized to collect the data. A total of 161 online instructors responded. While instructors and students agreed on the importance of several engagement strategies, results also show that instructors perceive engagement strategies listed on the survey instrument as more important than do students.

AbstractThe present study evaluated the validity of the Online Learner Satisfaction Instrument (OLSI) in terms of construct and convergent validity, and measurement invariance across demographic groups. The study results revealed that the factor structures generally confirmed to the original factor structure proposed in the instrument. Also, some subfactors showed a high correlation, suggesting a potential unidimensionality within each factor. The results of the convergent validity showed that the course subscale had high correlations with learner and instructor subscales, yielding inter-subscale correlations. The results of the measurement invariance testing showed that OLSI was interpreted the same way across participants of different gender and ethnic groups. However, measurement invariance was not supported across different educational levels (undergraduate vs. graduate). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]