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Student SATisfaction
Jeff Seaman, Ph.D.

Are students more or less satisfied with courses delivered at a distance than they are with face-to-face courses? Using the most recent comprehensive national study (see "Data" below), the Sloan Consortium has begun to examine this question.

A Sloan Consortium guiding principle is that the quality of online courses should be at least equal to that of the institution's face-to-face offerings. The principle suggests that students in online courses would report satisfaction levels equal to or higher than that for face-to-face courses. Is this what we find?

Overall comparision
The good news is that nearly one quarter of all distance education students report that they are more satisfied with their distance education course, and nearly one-half report equal levels of satisfaction. The bad news is that around three in ten report that they are less satisfied with distance education. The numbers are virtually the same for all distance education students or if we restrict our analysis to only those students taking online courses.

SAT Satisfaction Chart

Where is the best fit?
Do some groups of students who report much higher levels of satisfaction than others, and if so, why might that be?

When Sloan-C examined this question we found that student satisfaction with distance education was very similar across almost all dimensions. For example, there is virtually no difference in the reported satisfaction levels by delivery method for the distance course—those in courses using live video, recorded audio and video, or internet-based delivery methods show virtually no difference in satisfaction levels. Likewise, we found only small differences when we tallied the results by student age and by type of institution.

 
 

The big difference
The single dimension with large and consistent differences in student satisfaction is by SAT score. A very strong inverse relationship between combined SAT score and the relative level of satisfaction with distance education emerges—the lower the SAT score, the higher the satisfaction with distance education. (Note: For purposes of this question, ACT scores were converted to SAT equivalents).

There is an inverse relationship between SAT score and satisfaction — the lower the SAT score, the higher the satisfaction with distance education.

While the effect is substantial, the data provide little insight into why this might be the case. Is it that the students with the higher SAT scores excel in face-to-face courses and don't want to change? Could it be that students with lower SAT scores are reacting to less time pressure from the asynchronous nature of many distance education courses? While the wording of the question makes it easy to do a direct comparison of student satisfaction in the two types of courses, it does not allow us to know the level of satisfaction with each type alone. Is the difference due to a higher satisfaction level for the distance education course, or to a lower satisfaction level for the face-to-face course?

Data

The data for the analysis come from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, 1999-2000, a survey of over 60,000 students. Sloan-C created these specific tabulations using the National Center for Education Statistics' Data Analysis System.

 

 

  
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