New Learners' Satisfaction with Online Education: A Longitudinal Study

With recent advancements in IT, internet systems and and the need for IT-driven society, particularly during COVID-19, online education (online learning, or e-learning) has become inevitable to achieve the multiple objectives (such as cost-effective, time-efficient, quality enhancement, etc.) both for educator and learner. Keeping in view the importance of online education, the current study focuses on pedagogy of how to increase the efficiency of a learner. Therefore, this study is aiming to explore how these two dimensions of online learning style are used to measure new learners' satisfaction with online education, for which this study focuses on identifying the role of a student-teacher-contact (STC) in exploring the degree of learners' satisfaction with online education, and also applying the moderating effect of student-student contact (SSC). A total of 340 target respondents were surveyed in three phases. The results showed that STC interaction was insignificant during phase-I, whereas both interactions were found significant during phase-II & III. The research emphasizes that SSC in the presence of moderators has a significant determinant of the degree of new learners' satisfaction with online education. In addition, the management of online learning institutions will realize that SSC is essential for achieving new learners' satisfaction with online education. Since there is no sufficient literature on the moderating role of STC, this study is a valuable contribution to the existing body of knowledge.