Exploring Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions of Teaching and Satisfaction in Blended Learning

• Author / Creator

  Dragon, Karon L.

• This study investigates the influence of teaching attributes on student satisfaction as perceived by university students enrolled in a blended learning course when the learning context is predominantly a campus-based experience. It merges theory from educational psychology and marketing research to explore the psychometric functioning of a new teaching quality scale, the Blended Learning Questionnaire (BLQ). Secondary data from 178 undergraduate, Faculty of Education students using the BLQ instrument was used to investigate their perceptions of the teaching delivered in both formats, face to face and online, of a blended learning course. Results of exploratory factor analysis indicated that student-focused methods of teaching feedback are possible to measure in the relatively new educational context of blended learning, and that several key aspects of that context – the clarity of goals, quality of teaching strategies, and appropriate assessment methods - are salient to students. A multiple regression analysis using the recovered teaching factors predicted a total of 58% of student course satisfaction, with teaching in the face to face format predicting the majority of satisfaction (49%). However, when students’ importance ratings about the teaching experience were considered in the analysis, less course satisfaction was explained. In borrowing from the service quality literature, the BLQ was used to capture the discrepancies between students’ perceptions of the teaching (P) and their relative importance to satisfaction (I). A multiple regression analysis of the gap scores (P – I) predicted 22% less course satisfaction than students’ perceptions approach alone, with the majority of satisfaction again predicted by teaching experienced in the face to face setting (36%). While the perceptions approach evidenced greater predictive power, the information gained by including importance weightings allowed for the identification of service gaps which provides greater diagnostic power for blended learning educators than a single perceptions measure. In this study, efforts were primarily identified as best spent on improvements in specific aspects of online teaching delivery. Identifying areas of teaching that have the highest performance gap scores (i.e., high importance score and low perception score) is a step towards identifying which teaching qualities, or combinations, are most influential to the student experience. These findings support a growing trend in higher education research that links quality teaching to measures of student satisfaction so as to gather evidence of the effectiveness of teaching practices and curriculum change. As there has been little systematic quantitative research to date that has addressed key aspects of teaching quality across online and face to face experiences, this study represents an early exploration of this gap and contribution to the blended learning literature.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Student Perceptions
  • Satisfaction
  • Blended Learning
  • Teaching

• Graduation date

  Fall 2017

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3V98057C

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.