Feelings of alienation and community among higher education students in a virtual classroom

Although the professional literature identifies feelings of alienation and low sense of community as factors that help explain relatively low student persistence rates in distance education programs, no studies have attempted to investigate the relationship between these two constructs. Accordingly, the present study uses canonical correlation analysis to determine if and how a set of three alienation variables is related to a set of two classroom community variables in a sample (N = 117) of online graduate students. The results suggest that the two sets of variables are related along two reliable multivariate dimensions. Implications for college teaching are discussed.