Examining Types of Online Student Engagement and Their Contribution to Student Satisfaction and Perceived Learning in Online Graduate Courses. Selected Research and Development Papers, Association for Educational Communications and Technology, 2019.
Proceedings (Faculty180)
Online learning has grown exponentially due to its flexibility and rapid development of the Internet technology in the past decades. According to a recent report (Seaman, Allen, & Seaman, 2018) over six million students are taking at least one distance course, representing 31.6% of all students, and over three million students are taking exclusively distance courses, representing 14.9% of all students. However, retention rate and graduation rate in online programs have become a concern (B. Smith, 2010; Herbert, 2006; Heyman, 2010; James, Swan & Daston, 2016, Xu & Jaggars, 2014) and need further investigation. Online courses require high levels of self- regulation, motivation, time management and engagement from students in order to be successful in online learning (Azevedo, Cromley & Seibert, 2004; Yen & Liu, 2009). If students are fully engaged and actively involved in course learning activities and stay connected with other stakeholders in online learning, it is likely they will achieve the desired learning objectives, complete their courses, and finish their online programs. Therefore, it is critical to investigate which types of student engagement in online courses contribute to student satisfaction and their perceived learning.
The findings of this study revealed that some of the student engagement factors contribute positively to student satisfaction and perceived learning in online courses. The findings provided online faculty and instructional designers insights to consider incorporating different engagement factors when designing and revising their online courses.
