An Exploratory Study of the Drivers of Student Satisfaction and Learning Experience in Hybrid-Online and Purely Online Marketing Courses

Much of the existing research in distance education has focused on contrasting the outcomes between traditional face-to-face teaching and purely online courses, in which the entire course content is delivered online. However, research has not examined the effectiveness of hybrid-online courses, in which a combination of online delivery and face-to-face classroom teaching is used, especially in the context of marketing courses. This paper examines student experiences and learning outcomes in purely online and hybrid-online course formats. For both formats, student satisfaction is found to be affected by the course content, student-teacher communications, the use of effective learning tools, and the instructor. Improvements in perceived learning and course performance scores are observed for the hybrid-online format in the context of a qualitative marketing course while no such benefits are observed for a technical marketing course. The results indicate that the merits of different distance learning approac...