Personality, learning, and satisfaction in fully online academic courses

The current study attempts to characterize the relationship between learners' personality and their satisfaction with a fully online academic course, based on previous evidence regarding the relationship between personality and self-regulated learning (SRL), and between SRL and satisfaction with online courses. Personality and satisfaction questionnaires were addressed to 72 students who were enrolled in an online academic course, in order to characterize the learners and to examine the correlation between learners' personality and their satisfaction with the fully online course. Moreover, the possibility to predict the level of the students' satisfaction according to their personality was examined as well. The findings show that openness to experience and conscientiousness significantly predicted students' satisfaction. It was found to be possible to characterize groups of online learners; and that students with similar personality traits will prefer a similar synchronous channel. A preliminary model was produced, aiming to improve learners' satisfaction from online courses.