What do students rank as most important online?
Students prioritize a hierarchy of online-course quality factors spanning basic modality, teaching presence, and richer interaction.
Source
Integrating students' perspectives about online learning: a hierarchy of factors
What they did
After piloting an instrument, instructors distributed a Qualtrics survey to roughly twenty-five hundred students; nearly a thousand responded. Exploratory factor analysis organised student priorities into a hierarchy of online-learning quality factors grounded in presence and modality literature.
What they found
Students treated some baseline online conditions as near-threshold requirements while weighting teaching presence and interactive features as higher-order quality drivers. Factor means showed clear differentiation among clusters of importance rather than a flat list of preferences.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Self-report importance ratings are not measured learning gains. The sample skews young and comes from courses whose instructors opted into distribution, so priorities may differ elsewhere.
Key terms
- Teaching presence
- The instructor's design, facilitation, and direction that guides cognitive and social processes online.
- Social presence
- Learners' sense of being real people who can relate to others in the online environment.
- Cognitive presence
- The extent to which learners can construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse.
- Basic online modality
- Foundational online course features students expect before higher-order interaction matters.
- Hierarchy of factors
- An ordered set of quality drivers in which some elements act as prerequisites for others.
Flashcards
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Quiz yourself
How many students responded to the main survey?
Common questions
How many students responded?
Nine hundred eighty-seven, about a 40% response rate.
Was the survey instrument piloted?
Yes—with a 397-student pilot facilitating exploratory factor analysis.
Does the study measure grades?
No—it focuses on students' importance ratings of quality factors.
Who was surveyed?
Mostly young students, with 78% under age 30.
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