Online learning and student satisfaction: Academic standing, ethnicity and their influence on facilitated learning, engagement, and information fluency

A study by Mullen and Tallent-Runnels (2006) found significance in the differences between online and traditional students' reports of instructors' academic support, instructors' demands, and students' satisfaction. They also recognized that the limitation to their study was their demographic data. In an original report funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Dziuban, Hartman, Moskal, Brophy-Ellison, and Shea (2007) identified multiple student satisfaction groupings into dimensions that can provide structure to studies in online learning. In the present study, differences between academic standing and ethnicity were added to broaden the Mullen and Tallent-Runnels (2006) demographic deficiencies and used several student satisfaction dimensions identified by Dziuban, Moskal, Brophy-Ellison, and Shea (2007) and Moskal, Dziuban, and Hartman, (2009). The differences between academic standing and the studied dimensions were found to be statistically significant: the largest effect was Facilitated Learning and academic standing, which accounted for nearly 15% of the student scores' variance; and Engagement and Information Fluency had variance effects of, respectively, 4.5%, and 5.1%. However, error accounts for the majority of total variance in all the tests, which implies other variables' influence.